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I was born when my mother was 37, the sixth of her seven children. While our relationship has been complicated by the burden of a double generation gap, and our seemingly completely opposing viewpoints, I value my mother as one of my closest allies.

She was born in 1937 in Madera, California. My grandparents had escaped the dust storms of Oklahoma and were living in a tent by a river in California with 5 children already in tow. My grandmother was crippled, and the stress of the move contributed to an early delivery of my mother, who was born weighing just 5 lbs, her amniotic sac still wrapped around her.

At the age of 10, my mother was stricken with polio, the disease which had taken my granmother's ability to walk. Although she survived, the time in the hospital marked her, and she frequently recalls having her toys and books burned after she played with them, so as not to spread the contamination.

My mother's relationships with her mother and sister were tenuous, and a 15, she left home to take a job as a nanny and maid to a local woman. The following year, she met a shy, if handsome, young airman on a blind date. After one year of correspondence, they married in the winter of 1954. My newly wed parents greeted by oldest sister the following year, and another sister the year after that. By the time my mother was 22, she had 4 children under the age of 4, at 26, she added a fifth.

Life as a military wife is tough, and her young family moved often. She endured a brutal period in my father's native Indiana, where his sister, bitter at his unexpected marriage of my loud, outspoken mother over a local girl, went out of her way to make life difficult. My mother, sassy to the end, got hers though. My father's family are deeply religious, and fasted often at the direction of their pastor. When the pastor asked my mother if my aunt and her family were fasting, my mother replied, "Yep, they're eating as fast as they can." She is sharp, my mother, and funny.

After a series of moves, and 11 years since the birth of her last child, my mother discovered she was pregnant again. When word came that my father's unit was being tranferred to Florida, Mom put her foot down, and my father retired from the Air Force shortly after my first birthday. Another baby came 2 years later, and my sister and I were raised in an environment totally different from the hectic upheaval my siblings experienced. We had our father every day, and we moved just once, to an area with better schools.

I entered adolesence hard, burdened by my homosexuality, and my little sister's mental problems, which manifested in violent outbursts that frequently left me fearful for my safety. My parents, both rural people, had no frame of reference to deal with this powder keg of a child, and as a result, I felt isolated and alone. I turned to drugs and sex at a very young age, and resented my parents deeply. I ran away, attempted suicide, and finally left home, unable to stay in proximity to my sister.

It was only with distance that I could appreciate all my mother did with what she had. With only 9th grade education and a big, open heart, she raised 7 children, mostly on her own, through circumstances which could break a lesser woman. She is tiny, my mother, barely five feet, and now in her seventies, I realize that she is fragile, a precious orchid. As the days I have left with her are lined up in the distance, the last of them not so far away, I try to remind myself everyday that she is a hero, and that I am lucky to have her firey blood coursing through my veins.

Learn more about this author, B.D. Bolin.
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