Marty has brought so many new people into our lives. It’s a natural consequence of major
illness. You need help; you need help
from people you might never have met otherwise.
Marty’s new life has shown us so much and so many new people.
She came to us about seven years ago this month, a new
caregiver, the diminutive sister of another of Marty’s caregivers. She drove up in an old, white, beat up
mini-van. We knew nothing of her or her
life, she knew little of ours. It’s been
seven years since she started making a difference in our lives and we in hers. Our life got better the day she parked in
front of our house.
Marty and I struggled in those first months after the 2nd
stroke. We struggled those first years
to find the right caregivers, the kind of people who would really care for and
care about Marty, the people who were honest, the people who would come to work,
the kind of people you could invite to share all parts of your life. We kissed a lot of frogs and sent them on
their way, we found a few princesses but too often they moved on to other
castles.
This woman came and stayed.
We didn’t know her full story it at the time; we didn’t know
she had lived in that beat up van for a few days prior to coming back to Waco
from Austin. We didn’t know her husband
had bolted leaving her with three young kids, a new born, a mountain of debt
and no place to be.
It’s an all too common story. She had her first baby when she was 15. She is the living embodiment of why sex
education is important. She knew what
she was doing, but she didn’t really understand the potential consequences of
what she was doing. She was a baby
having a baby.
She got married to her baby’s father because it was what
seemed right. After they were married, after the birth of
her son, for reasons I don’t really understand or need to understand, she had
two more children before she was 20. At
20 she was the mother of three, she was still just a young girl, a girl with a
high school education, a strong work ethic, a wonderful mind and some dreams, a
loving heart and a quirky life view.
She worked at McDonald’s to support her family, she
eventually managed a shift at McDonald’s owing to her work ethic and
smarts. She went to school some and
became a Certified Nursing Assistant and almost a nurse, she just didn’t
finish.
The father of her children, her sort of husband, was not
really someone she ever thought she would stay with and she didn’t and of
course he didn’t take any responsibility for their children. It was just her and the three loves of her
life.
Then in the process of caring for a dying older woman she
met husband number two, a guy who was smart, educated and different. She fell in love with the different and the
smart not realizing he didn’t have substance.
The five of them moved to Austin, she worked, she got
pregnant again and the smart and different guy turned out to be not that
different after all and bailed right after their only child was born. He ran up debt and financial commitments that
she couldn’t keep and while she was still recovering from a poorly done
Caesarian she had to leave their home.
She did the only thing she knew to do, she continued to work as a
nursing assistant, living out of that beat up white mini-van.
It was shortly after that event that she came to Waco to
work as a caregiver for an agency in Waco.
The man with the fancy education and no heart came back to her and they
found a place to live together in Waco.
Her sister, one of the few caregivers we had found we liked was moving
on to a better paying job and recommended the woman to us. That’s when we met, she driving the sorry old
white van, me looking for some way to control life with Marty.
She brought a sense of comfort to both Marty and me. She came to work, she was smart, she was dependable,
she had initiative, she worked extra and she clearly cared for Marty, it was
easy to see, you could actually feel it.
She was confident in what she was doing and I finally found someone I
could trust. Finding her was the turning
point in our new normal.
She came to work every day, working long hours, working
extra hours when they were available to support her family. She was the caregiver where I could express
my anger, my frustration, my angst. She
absorbed it too much and only once or twice did she bark back because somehow
she knew that my ability to be angry in front of her, with her, meant I trusted
her completely.
The father of her fourth child, the one who made her
homeless, the one who begged his way back, left again, of course. The upside was she finally understood and
figured the guy out, he was gone for good.
Somewhere along the line this woman, with minimal help from
government grants (today no help because of budget cuts), with no help from
either of the father’s of her children, started back to school. She pieced together on-line school to finish
her bachelors and eventually was accepted into Baylor University’s doctoral
program in Psychology.
She has married again, this time she has married a man even
I approve of, like it matters. Today,
this woman who so easily could have been a statistic, a single woman of four
who let her life’s circumstances drive her into perpetual poverty, cares for
her kids, cares for Marty, cares for her new husband, excels at academia, does her internship at the Veteran’s
Administration and even, once in a while, takes care of me.
We have seen this young woman move from the lowest parts of
life to the precipice of triumph. She
has seen us through some of our darkest days and has brought a smile and a
light to us at a time it didn’t seem possible. This May she will graduate, she
will be the 2nd person from my house, the 2nd person from
our family to earn her doctorate from Baylor, the 2nd psychologist
to come from our home.
It’s bittersweet for
Marty and me because soon she will go, she will finish the first part of her
dream. She will show her children, she
will show the world that you can rise, that you can shine, that you can reach
for dreams and sometimes those dreams start to come true.
It makes me sad to know she will leave us, just as it made
me sad when our son Matt left, just as it made me cry when our daughter Erin
left the house. It makes me proud that
this woman, who has been a light in our life, will move on to something bigger
and better and that she will be able to be more than what her circumstances
might have dictated.
We will miss her, Marty will miss her care, I will miss her
smile and her conversation. We are so
very proud to have been a part of her life.
