Her primary care physician, who happened to be pregnant herself, was furious that this doctor had phrased it that way. “Listen, Karen,” her doctor said, “you do not have a choice. If you go the full nine-month term, your baby will die within minutes of being born. She will not live. You have a year-old child at home. I don’t want you waiting four more months to deliver a baby who will not live. End this pregnancy now and move on with your life.”
It was December 1993, and Karen was planning to return to Ames for Christmas, then fly to Hawaii with her family for vacation. She called Jane and Cathy, both of whom took the news calmly and weighed in supportively. But it was Jane who first uttered a word that Karen hadn’t heard from her doctors and hadn’t even contemplated. “You have to do it,” Jane said. “You have to have the abortion.” Karen hadn’t allowed herself to think that the “procedure” being talked about was an abortion. So Jane’s comment was sobering and haunting, especially since Karen was Catholic. It put everything in a new and awful light.
Karen told Jane and Cathy how guilty she felt. “I hadn’t wanted to be pregnant again so soon,” she said. “Maybe this was punishment for not being happy when I learned I was pregnant.” Both girls reassured her that she had nothing to feel guilty about. “It’s a genetic disorder,” Jane said. “That’s it.”
Karen decided to take the vacation in Hawaii as planned and then have “the procedure” when she returned. Her week away would allow her moments to say good-bye. At night in Hawaii, her hands on her belly, she’d talk to the little girl she felt moving inside of her, offering words of love and apology.
When she returned home, she went to the hospital, where labor was induced. “I was in the maternity ward,” she told Cathy, “but they didn’t want me near the other moms and babies. They had me way down the hall, where I wouldn’t be seen or heard.”
She was in a room without any clocks, which led her to think: “They don’t want me to know what time I deliver my baby.”
Her husband, Kevin, stood by her side, devastated but trying to stay strong. When the tiny baby was delivered, Kevin felt it would be best if they didn’t look at her. “They had her in a blanket, and they took her out of the room,” Karen told Cathy. “I kept saying I wanted to see her, and Kevin said, ‘No you don’t.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do. I do!’ and then I fell asleep.”
Karen understands and appreciates that her husband was acting out of love, but she still regrets not taking a look at the little girl she would have named Emily. And she wonders where the nurses took her when they carried her away. There was no burial, no funeral.
In memory of Emily, Karen has long worn a “mother and child” charm on a gold chain around her neck. It was given to her by her husband in the days after Emily was delivered. Karen rarely takes it off.
One summer back in Ames, Karen met up with some of the other girls, and Kelly watched her as she held that charm between her fingers. “I can only imagine the pain of that,” Kelly thought.
Karen went on to have two more children, a son and a daughter. And after Jenny had two miscarriages of her own, Karen helped her by talking about her experience losing a child she never got to know. Jenny and Karen also found strength in the knowledge that fully half of the Ames girls had had miscarriages, and all of them later gave birth to more children.
After Christie died, however, Karen never tried to tell Karla that she empathized. “It has to be so much worse to really know and love the child you’ve lost,” she thought. “I can’t tell Karla, ‘I know how you feel.’ I’m not sure any of us can know how she feels.”
On the back porch of Angela’s house, as some of the girls sip their morning coffee, Cathy and Angela happen to be seated on the so-called crying couch. Within fifteen minutes, there are tears.
First, Angela gets to talking about how her brother learned he was HIV-positive and about his 1999 death, offering details she has never shared before. “Growing up, he knew he was different.” she says. “He once told me that in Sunday school, when he was eight or nine years old, he’d pray that he wouldn’t have the feelings he had.” As he got older and more comfortable about being gay, Angela’s parents would talk to their minister about him. “The minister said, ‘If you pray really hard, it’ll go away,’ ” Angela says. When her brother was near death, this minister came to the hospital to suggest that he seek forgiveness for his sins. As Angela recalls it, the minister’s basic message was “You can still change. You can still say you were wrong.”
Angela’s mom had passed away four years earlier from breast cancer, and her dad had remarried. Angela says she is so grateful for her stepmother, who turned to the minister that day and politely asked him to stop. Deftly but respectfully, in so many words, she gave the message: “This young man feels like he’s going to hell because people like you have told him this. It’s time for you to leave this room.” When the minister left, Angela’s stepmother went over to Angela’s brother, held his hand and comforted him.
“Thank God she did that,” Cathy says.
Angela gets tearful at the memory, and Cathy moves closer to her, wrapping her arm around her. After Angela composes herself, she says, “My stepmother later told me that maybe her purpose in life was to help my brother die.”
Angela’s story triggers memories in Cathy, who offers details of her mother’s last moments before she died in 2005. She was seventy-seven and had leukemia. Cathy and five of her six siblings were there at the end. Her mother was home, on a rented hospital bed with a special air mattress. She was lucid, talking to everyone until 4 A.M. She passed away later that day.
“Just after she died, my brother said a lovely prayer. It was helpful. I felt this kind of calm numbness,” Cathy tells the other girls. She describes the scene in the room. “My mom had been on oxygen, and the machine was kind of loud. So we turned it off. But there was still this whirring noise in the room. It seemed to be coming from that hospital bed. So my brother-in-law kneeled down next to my dad, who was praying, and he decided to reach over and turn the switch for the air mattress on the bed. Suddenly, the air in the mattress started going out really fast with this big whoosh, and my mom’s body started getting lower and lower . . .”
Cathy makes the sound of the bed deflating. “. . . and so my father turned to my brother-in-law and said, ‘Why did you do that?’ And my brother-in-law, you could see on his face that he was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know why I did that!’ So he turned the bed back on, and my mother started rising up . . .”
Cathy is laughing now, and so are the other Ames girls. “My mom would have thought that was hysterical.”
“Your mom had the best sense of humor,” Karen says. All the girls remember Cathy’s mom as perhaps the friendliest of the mothers. Whenever they came to Cathy’s house, she wouldn’t head into another room, like most mothers did. As Cathy always said, “She loved to yuck it up with you guys.” She’d sit down with the girls to get the scoop on their lives. And she loved being dolled up. She wasn’t very tall, so she liked to wear shoes that gave her a few more inches. The girls remember her looking great, vacuuming her house in her high heels.
“For the funeral, my dad wanted to make sure my mother looked good,” Cathy tells the girls, “because, of course, she always wanted to look her best.” And so her dad asked Cathy, the well-known makeup artist, if she’d apply her mom’s makeup.
Cathy tells the girls of going through her mom’s things with her siblings, picking out clothing in just the right colors, and then taking her makeup kit to the mortuary. She stood over her mom’s body. “I thought I would be really freaked out, but it was just an act of love. It turned out to be a gift, that I had this chance to do that.”
Her mother had really full lips, so Cathy made sure to give her the right shade of lipstick. She worked on her mother’s face for about fifteen minutes, and the woman in charge of doing makeup at the mortuary was very impressed. “She asked me if I wanted a job there,” Cathy says.
Kelly,
Sally and Karla had made it to the funeral for Cathy’s mom, which was held in Kansas City. It was a year after Christie’s death, and it was not an easy journey for Karla to drive down for it.
The talk on the porch turns to the girls’ recollections of that funeral.
“There was that procession, when the whole family was walking out of the sanctuary,” Kelly recalls. “It was very emotional.”
“I felt so weak. Kelly, you were holding me up,” Karla says.
“And we were crying,” Kelly says. “People thought we were crying for Cathy’s mom, and we were. But it was more than that. We were crying for Karla and for Christie. We were crying for ourselves and our friendship.”
It was at that funeral that they saw Sheila’s mom after all those years, and asked her about Sheila’s death. So that particular day was overwhelming, and unforgettable, on several fronts.
Kelly tries to describe for the other girls what happened after the service. “We ran to the bathroom, Sally, Karla and I, just like we used to do in high school. That’s the refuge. And we cried. Horrible, awful crying. And I looked at Sally and said, ‘You know, we’ve done so many important things in ladies’ rooms, haven’t we?’ We smiled at each other. I think Karla smiled, too. And then we hugged Karla, and she cried and I cried and Sally cried. And being together like that, together in that ladies’ room, it was just a nice moment for us. A nice moment at a very hard time.”
14
Cooperation and Appreciation
Seven of the girls are power walking around Angela’s North
Carolina neighborhood, and the conversation has turned to parenting.
“Cooperation and appreciation,” says Jane. “That’s my mantra.” Jane says that she keeps repeating the same words to her children. “I tell them all the time: I want them to cooperate and I want them to appreciate. Cooperation and appreciation.”
All the girls are now raising their children with a higher standard of living than they knew growing up in Ames. Part of this is because American culture in general is more acquisitive and self-indulgent. And part of it is due to the fact that almost all of the girls have risen into the upper middle class. They’ve taken a step up from what their parents had—in family incomes, in the size of their homes, in the toys and accoutrements that clutter their kids’ lives.
Karen says her fourteen-year-old son thinks nothing of asking for a $160 hockey stick, and he’ll want it within minutes of eyeing it in a store. “When I was his age, I was detasseling corn, saving up money, and using the money to buy my own clothes,” she says. “I’m not sure kids today understand what that was like. There were things I wanted as a kid but would never ask for. I knew there was no reason to ask, because it wasn’t in the realm of possibility. My parents wouldn’t get it for me anyway.”
above: The girls’ hands on a pregnant Kelly left: Karla and Diana, both pregnant
A recollection comes into Karen’s head, and she turns to Jenny. “Remember in junior high? What was the coolest magazine?”
“Teen Beat,” says Jenny. “I had a subscription.”
“Yes, and I’d always go to your house to read it. Every issue. I never asked my parents for my own subscription. I knew it wasn’t necessary. Because, hey, I could just go to your house and read it there.”
The girls talk about the definition of “spoiled.”
“When I think of spoiled, I think of obnoxious and unappreciative,” says Karen. “I wouldn’t describe my kids like that. But they’re spoiled in the sense that they have no trouble just asking for whatever they want. My son wanted a Razr phone. It’s three hundred dollars. He just asked.”
Karla says that in the wake of Christie’s death, she has a heightened sense of the needs, moods and desires of her two surviving kids, Ben and Jackie. She knows how they feel inside—like a part of them is missing without Christie—and she knows it’s naïve to think she could fill that emptiness by buying them material things. Still, she admits that she has relented at times when they wanted her to buy them something. She knows life is fleeting and she wants them to be happy and feel whole.
All the girls want their children to be happy, of course. But when they think back to their own childhoods, they realize that their parents weren’t especially focused on keeping them happy and satiated. Their parents didn’t just give them things. Their parents were more apt to say: “You want something? Find a way to get it and leave me out of it.” As Karen sees it, there’s less of that philosophy in the culture of parenting today.
She reminds the girls of the time she and Karla were in a department store fashion show. As a reward, they got a discount on clothing. “I was so excited,” she says. “I had saved up my babysitting money, and I used it to buy a pair of Calvin Klein jeans, which was a real extravagance.”
The girls lament that the idea of wanting, saving, buying, savoring is foreign to a lot of kids today, even kids in Ames. These days, the students at Ames High and elsewhere in Iowa might not be as hip as kids in, say, Beverly Hills, but they’re still full-fledged consumers, like their peers all over America. At least that’s what the girls are hearing from loved ones back home. “My niece in Iowa went to get a bra and underwear for the prom and spent seventy dollars,” says Karen.
Jane circles back to her original point. The fact that kids have more today isn’t necessarily terrible, she says. But she urges the other girls, in their roles as mothers, to adopt her mantra.
She tells them a story: “A couple of summers ago, my family was out all day doing fun stuff. We went to the water park. We went out to eat. It was almost the whole day. And we got home at four o’clock and the girls were asking Justin and me, ‘What do we do now?’ Like they were already bored. And I’m thinking, ‘Jeez! We’ve been having a good time all day long! What am I, a camp director?’ And that’s when I started saying, ‘Things won’t be going well in this house, and fun times won’t be happening, unless we have cooperation and appreciation.’ I think everything can be distilled down to those two words.”
The girls stop walking to stand under a tree and take a drink from their water bottles. That’s when Kelly says that maybe they should cut back on their pining for the good old days and their complaining about young whippersnappers. They’re starting to sound like grouchy old ladies.
“Anyway, on some level, I think our kids do understand the issues,” Jane says, and then offers up another story. At Hebrew school, her daughter Hanna was recently given an assignment. The kids were studying the Ten Commandments, and each was asked to create an appropriate eleventh commandment. Hanna came up with “Thou shalt be appreciative.”
“She explained to me that people don’t appreciate all the things they have, and they should,” says Jane. “And I was so thrilled. I said to Justin, ‘Wow, the kids heard us! We’re getting through!’
“You know, it’s funny, because half the time, as your kids get older, you feel like you’re talking to a wall. You feel like an inanimate object that they’re ignoring. But sometimes, when you’re just living your life, they surprise you, and when they do, wow, it’s so great.”
From the moment Karla delivered Christie in 1990, and through all the children who’ve followed, the girls have been trading an unending procession of motherhood tales.
Often, their reports from the home front are meant merely to entertain.
In a 1999 letter to all the girls, Marilyn described her daughter, Emily, as a three-year-old optimist with “a zest for skipping” rather than walking. “On warm summer days, she likes to exclaim with delight, ‘It’s our lucky day!’ ”
That same year, Jane’s younger daughter was two years old. “Sara shows a strong independent streak,” Jane wrote. “She seems to have no fear except for clowns and ice-cream trucks. Our only fear is the day Sara sees a clown driving an ice-cream truck!” Meanwhile, Hanna was four years old that year, and when she got her tonsils out, she took a liking to the Vicodin she was taking for her pain. “We then had another problem,” Jane w
rote, “a kid who kept pleading with us, in shorter and shorter intervals, for more Vicodin—even after the doctor said she was completely healed and in no need of pain medication. Fortunately, we were able to stop just short of a twelve-step program.”
Sally’s daughter Lindsay won her school’s spelling bee at age ten in 2001, “so now we are spelling more than we talk in our house, in preparation for the next level of competition,” Sally wrote.
The girls identified their kids to each other in part by their quirks. At age three, Karla’s son Ben was a loud talker. At age six, Kelly’s daughter Liesl wanted hair like Jan Brady of The Brady Bunch. At age eight, Marilyn’s son David decided to wash his Game Boy in the sink, and Marilyn had to use a hair dryer to dry it out and get it working again. Those were among the million anecdotes the girls shared with each other.
On some fronts, the girls first got involved with each other’s kids prenatally. In 1998, for instance, Kelly, Karla and Diana visited Cathy’s house in California. On the plane ride west, Kelly watched Diana devour a McDonald’s Big Mac. “I’ve never seen you eat like that before!” Kelly said. “Maybe you’re pregnant.” Diana and her husband had two daughters at the time, and hadn’t yet settled on the idea of having another child. But in L.A., the other girls convinced Diana to go to a drugstore and buy a pregnancy test. Sure enough, and to her surprise, she tested positive. So the Ames girls knew the good news—she was pregnant with her third child—before her husband did.
From the time they each got email accounts, the Ames girls have been asking each other for instant advice regarding their kids. One of them recently had questions about attention deficit disorder and teens—what are the signs?—and threw it out to the other girls. Sally and Kelly weighed in as teachers. Cathy offered nutritional advice. Everyone had thoughts.
The Girls from Ames Page 22
