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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Wild Thing
Is hell satisfied?
In keeping with their authors' dark histories, "The Iron Giant" and other children's tales by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath tell ominous fables about ambition, despair and people's disregard for nature and one another.
By Polly Shulman
[08/25/99]

The dark side of Disney
There's no escaping the commodification of childhood.
By Samuel G. Freedman
[08/23/99]

Disney rocks!
Forget the long lines, the schlocky toys and the canned music. Disneyland will always be the Magic Kingdom for this lifelong Mouseketeer.
By Lisa Moskowitz
[08/22/99]

Wild Thing
Book information
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[08/20/99]

Wild Thing
Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!
Classic fairy tales get a feminist makeover for parents who don't like their princesses tricked out, locked up or comatose. But were the old ones really that bad?
By Margot Mifflin
[08/20/99]

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My dad, always the brisk reporter, answered the phone in a clipped voice.

"I need help," she pleaded.

Not recognizing the ragged voice, my father said, "Lady, you need to call 911 right away."

And then, my mom said, "David, it's me. It's Rosemary. Something's horribly wrong."

An ambulance was dispatched, a shooting star on a deserted country road. I got the call from my dad hours later: My 55-year-old mother had had a massive stroke -- but she was still alive.

I bundled my son, Ian, 2 at the time, in pajamas and blankets and we headed to the hospital, a three-hour trip from Akron, where I was a medical writer for the Beacon Journal.

None of us could comprehend the scope of what had happened. Shortly after the stroke, my mother turned to me and said, "I wake up every morning, and think, 'Oh God, I'm still in hell.'"

In a night, my mother, a teacher by trade, lost her independence and her former life. Partially paralyzed on her left side, she also lost motor skills, her balance and the melody of her voice. And she lost Ian, her only grandchild.

Afraid of the new wheelchair, he no longer wanted to even greet her, ignoring her outstretched arms. "I don't like her," he said once at the door, turning his chubby face into my thigh and causing tears to well up in my mother's eyes. We saw the same reaction when my parents and Ian watched "Fly Away Home," a movie about a young girl who lost her mother and finds hope by teaching a flock of goslings how to migrate. Ian pointed to Igor, one of the goslings who's crippled. "Something's wrong with him," he said. "I don't like him."

"To back away from someone who is disabled is a completely normal behavior for a 3-year-old or a 4-year-old," I was told by Curtis Rodgers, vocational counselor and the peer support coordinator at Atlanta's Shepherd Center, a rehabilitative hospital. "They simply do not have the cognitive skills to process what has happened," said Rodgers, himself in a wheelchair for 18 years after a spinal cord injury. "They don't get what's happened to grandma. They don't understand why they can't do the things they used to do."

Intellectually, I was relieved. At least my child was normal. But emotionally, it wasn't much help. I still had a mom in pain, rejected by her grandson. And I still had a son who rebuffed any attempts to repair the relationship with his grandmother.

And, of course, all of us were still wishing that things were the way they were before my mother's stroke.

When Ian was born in 1994, I could hear my mother gasp under her mask in the operating room when the doctor held up my blond newborn son. She later told me she was unprepared for the jolt to the past -- to 1963 when she was handed her own blonde baby, me. And when Ian was finally swaddled up, cute and clean and healthy, it was my mother who had the first bonding moment with him -- and insisted the nurse shoot a Polaroid of the three of us. (That was good, because, to be honest, they could have handed me, dosed up on meds, a kangaroo and I still would have cooed, "pretty baby.")

When Ian visited my parents throughout his babyhood, he would snuggle deep into my mom's lap, touch her coiffed light brown hair and kiss her smooth, soft cheeks. She, always the teacher, insisted on 8 p.m. bedtimes and that he master three new skills every time he was at her home. It was my mother who taught Ian how to drink out of a straw, blow bubbles and snap his fingers.

But after the stroke, she depended on a wheelchair and a walker. Their home, a rambling two-story Victorian packed with eclectic books and projects, was transformed. Steel grab bars were installed. My mom and dad abandoned their second-floor bedroom of more than two decades and moved into the downstairs guest bedroom. They removed the door to the bathroom because a wheelchair wouldn't fit. And as the weeks passed, and then the months, I watched Ian harden toward her.

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