SPOTW: Tina

One afternoon in 1997 I came home on just another day.  I poured a glass of juice and flipped through the pile of mail laying on the dining table.  As I browsed the junk and coupons, I glanced down and noticed the message light on the answering machine blinking.  I hit the button and was greeted by Tina’s voice.  It was calm.  Seemingly normal.  But, thirteen years of friendship behind us, I knew something was off.  Despite a lack of panic and outright distress,  the Tina on the machine was not the Tina I knew.  I immediately dialed her number and someone else answered the phone.  I asked for her and they hesitated, a long, silent, pregnant pause that made every hair on the back of my neck stand up.    I quickly identified myself and had to sit down as it suddenly became no longer  just another day.

Earlier that morning, Tina was at home alone with her two year old daughter while her husband  of five years was out  for a guy’s day on the Rio Grande River.  In the course of of her normal mothering and wifely duties, she had found time to take a pregnancy test.  As she suspected she was indeed pregnant with their second child.   She went about her routine, a bit floaty and giddy, anxiously waiting to deliver the news.  She never had the chance.   While taking full advantage of the glorious New Mexico day, her husband had been caught in a strong undercurrent and pulled underwater and washed down river.   Tina was suddenly a single, expecting mother.    Everyone who knew them was just in shock. To this day, two things stand out in my mind from his funeral:   their daughter, blissfully too young to understand the world shattering meaning of that day, dressed in her black velvet dress and patten leather Mary Janes, spinning in circles under the shade of a giant cottonwood tree ,  and Tina sitting down next to me after the services and, with a profound lack of emotion, matter of factly making the observation that,  I guess, I’m the widow ***** now.  

I never saw her crack.  I know she must have.  On the inside she must have been screaming in pain, anger, disbelief.  But on the outside she took deep breaths and simply stated that she trusted God had a plan for her.   Never in all of my life have I been so grateful for another person’s deep, unwavering, fully devoted Christian faith.  The kind of Christian I wish I was able to be, it was her hope and belief in God’s word and promises that carried her through the long days and weeks, the loneliness of a baby shower that should have been shared, the bittersweet birth of her son eight months later, and beyond into an uncertain future.   She focused on God.  She focused on her children.  She just kept going, one step, one breath at a time, one prayer at a time. 

Another hard to stomach, tragic story of one woman’s descent into single parenting, another happy ending.  In 2002 I had the honor of attending Tina’s second wedding.  Hope yet again for all single moms that there are good men out there who will accept us as we are, where we are, and embrace our fractured families as their own, when the time is right.   She may no longer be a single parent, but I continue to be in awe of what a strong, amazing mother she is to her children.    How she carried them through that difficult time, set the examples she firmly believed they deserved with so much grace and dignity.  The solid values she continues to instill.  As can happen in a long life, we have had periods of time where our paths separated, but Tina is one of those unconditional friends who you can lose touch with without ever losing a day.  The open arms will always be there no matter what.   Twenty-Five years after the day we met (HOW am I old enough to have had a friend this long?), the first day of high school marching band practice, I am still proud to know her and say she is my friend, still blessed to have her as a shining example of the kind of single mother I can only hope that I am able to be to the N-Man.

For you Tina, this week’s inspirational single parent of the week.

Ducky’s wife

I found my inspiration this weekend in a woman I have never met, who married a boy  man I haven’t seen since I was eighteen years old. Doug, or Ducky as we used to call him (pre Sixteen Candles, thank you very much) was a cornerstone of our social circle in high school.  Anywhere any of us went, so did Doug.  Football games, weekend nights hanging out at McDonalds, awkward teenaged dances, just crusing around town.  There he was.   But as happens in life, somewhere along the way, we fell into the rhythm of our individual paths and we drifted away, not out of ill will, simply circumstance.  But Doug has always been there despite his absence.  So much a part of all of us was he that, at my wedding, we all left a space in the pictures of our clique where he should have been standing.  

I learned of the tragedy that befell our dear Ducky just this past  Sunday.  In 2004 he had a severe allergic reaction to something unknown to this day and his brain was deprived of oxygen.  He was placed in a medically induced coma for almost a month.  Following his awakening he had to relearn everything.  Everything you and do with no thought at all.  Talking, walking, eating.  Doug was functionally gone, physically and mentally.  

But this story isn’t about Doug.  It’s about the woman who fell in love with him, bore him three children, and, to this day, refers to him as the love of her life.   Doug’s wife.   I don’t know her.  I’ve chatted with her one time, on Facebook, out of a need to express my gratitude for her dedication and admiration for her strength.  But you don’t have to know a woman like this personally to understand the depths of who she is when you can so clearly see the storm she has weathered, the way she played the cruel hand dealt to her by life.  There is often discussion in the single parent blogosphere about how we each came to be solo parents and the burdens we carry as a result.   Doug’s wife took a path I could never wish on anyone, trials paving her path like land mines.  For the day Doug stopped breathing for just a little bit too long, she was  quite unexpectedly thrust into our world, all the while, her partner & father of her children still at her side. 

For years, she  stayed dedicated, true to Doug.  She was at his side in the hospital.  Later at the rehabilitation hospital.  She brought him home to the family house and became not only his wife, but his nurse, his physical therapist, his every basic need provider.  The new, sole bread winner of the family, she was forced to re-enter the work force.  She was further inspired to enroll in physical therapy school.  She received twenty hours a month of respite care from her twenty four hour a day duties.  All of this burden on top of caring for their three children with minimal assistance from family.   Take a moment now, if you will, and try to comprehend the incredible ball of entangled emotions that go into to living your life as a single mother, while all the while still caring for a shell of a husband who has left you, yet is still right there.

Doug only improved and came back, so much.   He cannot walk.   His brain is damaged beyond ever being able to care for himself.   He is now where he will be for the rest of his life, a man now a large toddler, trapped in a broken body.   Through three long trying years of devotion and daily dedication,  she watched her children grow up with a father to whom they simply could not relate and forgivingly cope with a mother who  had also all but disappeared from their lives to care for that man.  Many of us faced huge decisions, made painful choices on our road to single parenthood, but Doug’s wife’s  decision was more heart wrenching than anything I can imagine. In 2007, she moved Doug to a nursing home so that she could reclaim her life for the sake her children.  For a year she visited regularly, daily, continued to be by his side.  But as happens, despite her efforts and the placement of her heart, she found herself drifting further and further away from the life that she once knew as his wife and matriarch of a shared family unit.  With as much understanding as he could offer and a great deal of mutual heartbreak, they divorced in 2008.

Despite their legal status, she continued to help oversee his care.  She regularly took  takes her children to visit their father.  She continues to experience a guilt beyond anything I hope I ever know.   And after years of married, single motherhood and a year of legal status in our realm, she has finally re-found love with a new man who 100% supports her circumstances and accepts that, in many ways, she still is and  will always be, Doug’s wife.   They were recently married, with myDucky’s blessing.

I look at my own path to this solo performance, and despite the fact that the pain of my journey was still very real to me, I am grateful for single parents with far more strength than my own to help me keep this life in perspective.  My own world may have come down around me, but not in the dramatic fashion of one ill fated decision as to what to eat for lunch that then lingered, cruelly for years.  My hat is off to Doug’s wife.  Thank you for taking such amazing care for my friend for as long as you did.  Thank you for the strength and grace you emulate.  Thank you for reminding us all that we should never, NEVER take one single moment for granted.  I hear the guilt and heartache in your story, suspect you have faced unfair judgment from those who can never comprehend.  But please know that you will never find anything but support in this place.   Doug’s wife, you are my first official single parent of the week.