As the mother of five children, Laverne has spent plenty of her life taking care of other people. But after her son Donny was paralyzed from a fall, her care giving added another dimension - tough, true love.
Laverne's Story
"When you have children, you are never out of the woods and you never know what you are going to face."
You can't protect your children. Children have to have experiences and learn from them in order to survive. Sometimes it is better for a child to have been out on the street and know how to be streetwise than it is for them to be protected from everything. When my five children were young, I would say, "If they can get themselves into this situation then they can get out of it." When we would go to the park if they were attempting to climb up a slide I never helped them. If they can't climb up it, then they don't need to be going up there. If they did climb up it, I never said, "Come back down. You might hurt yourself. You might fall."
"My son Donny had a paralyzing accident when he was 26."
He fell out of a tree was paralyzed from his chest down. He sits up in his wheelchair, and he has all his motion, but he doesn't have a grip. When Donny was in intensive care, the nurse came in and said, "Will he be able to go home and live with you?" and I said, "Yes." There was not even a beat. I had just started going back to school and I had this frozen moment like, "Alright, now what am I going to do? I need to take care of him and here I am going back to school." I realized that this wasn't going to go away; he was paralyzed, it wasn't going to go away. I needed to do what I needed to do for myself, so I stayed in school and then figured out a way to negotiate both of our lives so that he could become independent and live on his own eventually.
"We had the attitude that pushing him would help him be able to live on his own."
We have a strong family and a lot of support; my husband was very supportive and his siblings were very supportive. I am older than he is and I am going to die first supposedly, so there had to be a way for him to figure out how he was going to handle his life. We were rather ruthless at times, like, "Come on Donny, you have to figure this out." Maybe that has helped him so that he can live on his own. He has to have people help him, but he arranges all of that now. He also does architectural drawings on the computer and earns a living. He was a carpenter when he had his accident so he knows a lot about that, so now he is able to build his own business that way.
"The only way to gain control is to give up."
I finally published my memoir, The Garden Girls' Letters & Journal, last February. The garden girls are characters that I invented to accompany me as I negotiate my life dealing with the real world. They discuss questions of intimacy, passion and authority; they have tea parties, and go hiking in the woods, they dress flamboyantly. This is a part from my journal shortly after Donny had his accident:
"I find the only way to gain control is to give it up. I can demand and demand, and it will not produce the results I want. Again and again, I want to ask, 'Why?' as though there is on the surface a conscious answer. I have discovered the inappropriateness of asking others why questions. I can only ask myself why and only occasionally, or I will become bogged down in the mire of the unanswerable. I place one foot in front of the other and it has gotten easier lately. I told Donny there is nothing wrong with him, except he can't walk. We are all fragile. I remember how Dana held me when the doctor first said, "No, Donny probably won't get his grip back either, no wheel chair basketball, no dart competitions." I must remember that fragility is cracks in all of my children, like crystal began to slowly appear. Dana's miscarriage, Danielle's divorce, Johnny's suspension, D.J.'s ticket, Donny's paralysis. Each child's fragility surfaces in the struggle to understand."
