DONNA’S BOOK

The Mother Load

Someone once told me that when you begin to write a book, start from the middle, so I guess that would be my daughters Matan and Eden versus Koren and Ketura who are my bookends.

I was blessed with Matan in my 28th year of life, and this pregnancy almost killed me. There is nothing more alarming then having your obstectric nurse search frantically for the heartbeat of your child while you are strapped to a belt monitor which specifically reads your child’s every life beat.

“What, no heartbeat? Oh my G’d. G’d where are you?”

Sirens are going off, people with blue face masks and badges start running in. My doctor magically reappeared and in a soothing voice that masks panic, softly says that everything will be alright. My lightheadedness tells me different.

“Why are they running with me down the hall? Where’s my husband? ”

They are running faster. So is my mind. My body is laying on a gurney and I’m hoovering above myself. Watching. Watching and waiting.

“What’s happening to my baby? Is my baby alright?”

I experience no pain. Great fear. Everyone is working at superspeed. I feel other dementional - can’t move, can’t speak, not numb. Terrified.

THE light - the big bright light pulls me in.

“Am I dead.” My life has not flashed in front of me yet. Is this, THE light?

“Count with me backward”, I hear. “..three, two, one”.

It’s a cold, rainny morning in Los Angeles. This wet doesn’t happen much. “Hurry up or you’ll be late for school”. Being known as the last parent that arrives almost everywhere is not the most flattering way to be known. Having four girls at three different schools I am told, does not qualify for an excuse. Warming up in the garage they came pouring out of the house, something like the rain was doing outside the friendly confines of our home.

“Does everyone have their backpack?” “Lunches?” “Mom, did you make me a jelly sandwich?, Matan asks. “Yup”, I answer proud to have gotten it right this time. “But Mom, Koren likes jelly, I like the peanut butter”. “O.K., trade”. “But you gave her the apple juice box and I like my orange”. “O.K., then keep your orange juice and trade the sandwiches”. “But Mom….”

This is the start of a typical day in the Brownstein house. Drop Koren off at Yale Academy; Matan at the Bay of the Arts School; and Eden and Ketura at New World Elementary. “It is a New World”, I mumbled to myself as I made the last drop. Life as a single mom. It doesn’t get crazier than this.

Who knew when I asked for a divorse he’d leave the country. Do people do that? Just leave and take no responsibility. He was a good dad. He assured me he would be.

The year is 1981. He jumps out of his shinny red Austin Martin wearing Ray Ban sun glasses and smelling like gasoline. He’s six feet tall, an ex-tank commander in the Israeli army, fudged his english classes in high school or else he’d speak the language better. He has a cocky swagger and I’m hooked. Hooked like crazy glue. Maybe glued is a more discriptive expression of what became of me that summer. It was 24 hours together, then 48, we could not part. I had a college class in inter-group dynamics that I could not miss. Have you ever tried to seperate something that has been stuck together with crazy glue? Well that was how I showed up to class. Torn from the love of my life with a great story to tell the group.

So that’s the girls’ father. We both said we wanted lots of kids. Four girls for sure and then maybe adopt. Four girls was my magic templet. That was all I imagined for myself since reading Little Women when I was fifteen. A house of strong minded young women. Fiddler on the Roof only reinforsed this desire.

There is not a whole lot more to tell other then we got married the following summer. Had four girls in seven years. Grew in different directions in all of the “biggy areas of life”, and after seventeen years I wanted out. I wanted out real badly. Life was calling me for bigger challenges - who knew that what I wished for myself would be larger than life. Larger than five lives.

After dropping the kids at school I had just enough time to do a little food shopping until going to the office to hear about everybody elses life. Oh, I forgot to mention, during the seventeen years, four children in seven years, nursing all of them until infanitim (?), and going to school, I completed my Master’s degree in psychology, did my internship and started a private practice. Life was on a roll. Rolling down hill picking up speed with every task I added to my plate. Did I crash into a big bolder and end the race you might ask. No, not yet, but I did have a few close calls.

The month the “baby dad” left the country, he fathered a new baby and my oldest daughter ended up in the ICU with a horribly fragile case of Type I diabetes. I mention the two events together not only because they happened simultaniously, but I don’t know which was more painful. This was to be the first hospitalization of thirteen that followed during the next eighteen months. Crashing into a bolder seemed like a very good option. I did not have the luxury of a nervous break down.

My clients helped me take my mind off of the current state of affairs as well.

It’s Wednesday, 2:00. Susan’s regular weekly session time and in she walks as desheveled as usual smelling like old cigaretts. Her brown ragid hair, well what’s left of it since her last weave, is flattened against her pale face. She suffers from trichitollomania and she not only pulls out her own hair, but pulls out the weave hair as well. As I was saying, in walks Susan as usual. Oh, there is one more thing important to note. I have not seen a change of outfit in two years. Yes, two years. It’s not that the 42 year old woman does not have the money to afford a panty change. In fact, she is an heires to a billion dollar cosmetic fortune developed by, “daddy”, otherwise known as the father that flys in on his private jet and bursts into my office to announce his arrival no matter that my door is shut and the sign saying, “in session” in prominantly displayed. Suddenly my mind quickly wanders to the plight of Koren, making sure I have enough insullin in the refrigerator for the next week and I am caught off guard by her question. “Hey Donna, do mind if I fart out your window?” “Fart out my window” I repeat stunned. I thought after fifteen years of psychotherapy practise I had hear it all. “Yes, fart out your window on everyone in Beverly Hills”. With that she pulled down her black leggings and stuck her bare butt out the window and let it go! Now there’s a metaphor for you! Could it be that Beverly Hills represents “daddy” and her passing gas represents what he can do with his fortune.

Finances have been real tough lately. There does not seem to be enough to go around. It’s like a belt that once fit but now cuts at your buldging wasteline and suffocates you even when you are holding your stomach in. We are talking THAT kind of tight. I am at the beginning of my practise. I have completed my Masters program in nineteen laborious months while pumping breast milk into baby bottles stashed in the Dean’s private refrigerater, became a registered trainee (another words, I worked for free), moved on to be an intern (earned a tad more money), and graduated with music playing in the background and a fourth child begining her inroads 4 days after conception. Life was full and I was beginning to feel naseated.

Trapped by expenses of private schools, healthcare premiums and an expensive roof to cover our heads, I took on another job working with clients that were managed under Workman’s Comp. In other words, this is where a client hurts their index finger lifting luggage as they work diligently for an airlines as a baggage carrier then sues the airlines for damages not only for their injured finger, but for the psychic trauma this injury has caused them. Am I missing something? Is there a connection between his impotence and his broken index finger? Now I understand why my healthcare premiums are so high.

Work is fierce, but the desire to overcome my fear of homelessness creates a fire in my belly that pushes me further. My main concern these days is my eldest daughter, Koren. Since her diagnosis she has dropped a significant amount of weight. She looks gaunt and grey with lavender circles under her eyes. She complains of back pain and leg cramps and I rub the hell out of her fragile body till she signals that the pain has passed. Every few days her leg muscles contort into knots so stiff and profound they remind me of her elbow protruding from my eight month old pregnant belly. The shape is so defined. She is twelve now and the seventh grade has been met by huge attendance challenges. She is missing more days then she attends and she fears she will not pass to the next grade.

She has matured with this illness. Her already responsible self has become an overseer of her care. She knows the instructions by heart, how much of each insullin type, where to poke, how to read her meter, all of it. I feel left out. A helpless kind of left out that can’t fix it for her. She is in the middle of it and I become an observer. Some days there is no managing of it and her sugars go from highs of 480 to lows of 27. It seems that we have created a race track from the house to the hospital and back. We know which streets to take at what time of day and when to call an ambulance. Her endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital is cold and calculating with no bedside manner which makes this journey alot less friendly.

I look at all the parents in the waiting rooms we have filled. It’s a rainbow of the universe. A multi-colored, multi-lingual mish-mash of concerned parents gathered together in hope of either over-coming or managing this erratic childhood disease. We wait with empathetic grins on our faces as our names are called, and on we march into examination rooms. During this visit her doctor makes no bones about my neglect in allowing Koren’s sugar level to vassilate so randomly. She even threatens to contact the Department of Children’s Services to have her removed from my home and into the custody of a social worker who too is diabetic. I am enraged on one hand and feel like an incompetant mother on the other. I promise to monitor her better, and we are sent home with new refill slips.

At night I ask Koren to sleep with me and every three hours I wake to test her blood. Even with such diligance, her numbers fly off the scales of normal and I am terrified to confront her doctor again in the morning, after only a week of being home in my care.

I am afraid to loose her. I am more afraid she’ll die.

The way I show my love is taking her in inspite of myself and readmitting her to find stability in that little body again. She is such a champ. Again with the I.V., again with urine samples and ketone strips, again in that sterile environment that sick people have to endure in order to get well again. Fortunately she is visited by classmates and the principle who bring her cards they have made and homework assignments to catch up on. No one knows how long this visit will be. A few days. A week. Several weeks. Unfortunately even modern medicine in the best hospital takes nine days to get some consistant sugar readings. I wanted to shout and jump up and down, “I told you so. I took really good care of my daughter and her sugars still flipped out. I didn’t do it to her”.

No, I did not do this to her. She inherited her diabetes from her father. I have learned that 70% of girls diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes have diabetic fathers. Her father had left the country two weeks earlier to heal from the pain of the divorse and we are still, eleven years later, waiting for his return. Actually, we stopped waiting for his return.

I have been fighting flu-like symptoms for three weeks now. Today it seems I couldn’t out run the bug. It is hard to take care of daily chores and routine tasks when feeling feverish, tired and achey. Time does not wait for me to feel well again, it calls me to attention now.

Matan is showing signs of despair. She is unable to keep up with a dual cirriculum of english and judaic studies. She, like her sisters have been attending a private Jewish day school which has not only a strong academic foundation of secular studies, but an emphasis in the hebrew language and Biblical studies as well. Topics such as law, ethics, relationships, sensitivity to animals and creation are all discussed. Learning to write english from left to right while also learning to write in hebrew from right to left is a difficult task for any child, but for one with a severe case of dyslexia, it is impossible and an unreasonable request for me to promote at the expense of her self esteem. Feeling defeated hurts her childhood view of herself much more than a simple letter grade could ever define her.