by Si Robertson
“We are fixing to have a hootenanny like you ain’t seen in your lifetime!”
Christine and I pose with Trasa when she was only a toddler. After we had tried for so long to have a baby, her arrival was one of God’s great blessings.
Trasa
ONE OF THE HAPPIEST days of my life was August 30, 1975, when my daughter, Trasa Robertson, was born at a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. After going through so many struggles to have a child, Christine and I couldn’t have been more excited. We named Trasa after Christine’s father, Asa Lee Raney, and she actually has dual citizenship because she was born in Germany while I was stationed there.
From the time Trasa was born, she was Daddy’s girl. When Trasa was old enough to crawl, she sat in the foyer of our house every day waiting for me to come home for lunch. She’d sit in my lap while I ate, and then she was waiting in the foyer again at the end of my workday. Her eyes lit up every time I walked in the door, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sight.
When Trasa was only a toddler, Christine and I realized that she was an exceptional child. She was an absolute angel until she was three years old, but then she turned into a little devil. Christine took her to the pediatrician on the military base, and the doctor talked to Trasa without her mother in the room. The pediatrician came out and told Christine to put Trasa in preschool because she was bored to death. We put Trasa in preschool for two hours a day, and it really made a difference in her behavior.
Trasa could read before she went to kindergarten. Hey, I told you my stock was grade A! One day in preschool, the teacher told the class something that wasn’t factually correct. My three-year-old daughter stood up and said the right answer. Needless to say, the teacher didn’t like being corrected by a toddler.
Trasa was always a very curious child. When we lived in Germany, I still liked to go squirrel hunting. I’d kill five or six squirrels and bring them home to cook. Trasa was probably only five years old at the time, but I had her hold the squirrels’ legs while I skinned them. As I was gutting the squirrels, she would always ask what the organs were.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“That’s its kidneys,” I told her.
“What’s that?” she asked again.
“That’s its heart,” I said.
She was fascinated by the anatomy of a squirrel, while most girls her age would have been completely grossed out. Squirrels are my favorite game to eat, and Trasa loves eating them, too. When she started dating her future husband in college, they were sitting on a park bench, watching squirrels run around in the grass.
“Oh, I’d love to have a rock and hit them and then take them home and cook them,” Trasa said.
Trasa’s boyfriend looked at her like she was nuts and asked, “What are you talking about?”
“That’s the best meat you’ll ever eat,” she told him.
Hey, that’s my girl. She’s a chip off the old block.
When Trasa was eight years old, a military psychologist on the base tried to tell us how to treat her because she was so intellectually gifted. But we wanted our daughter to be normal, so we treated her like any other kid. To this day, Trasa thanks us for not treating her like she was different.
When Trasa was growing up, if Christine or I needed to punish her, we would take her books away. She always begged us to take away something else, like the TV or dessert, but we took her books away because we knew how much she loved to read and learn. Eventually, we even had to put a time limit on how long she could read. If Trasa didn’t have a book in her hand, we thought something was wrong with her. Sometimes I would ask her, “Hey, why don’t you have a book in your hand? Are you sick?”
Because Trasa was so intellectually gifted, she never had many friends growing up. In fact, she was very isolated and kind of a loner until middle school. But then Trasa made two friends in the sixth grade, and the girls made a world of difference for her. One of the girls knew how to wear makeup, and Christine asked her to teach Trasa how to use it. The girls went shopping together, and Trasa started buying clothes that the other teenagers were wearing. She never worried about her appearance as much as she did about her brain. More than anything, those girls taught Trasa how to be a teenager.
Along the way, I learned that raising a teenager is about as hard as trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. I tried to do the best I could do and offered Trasa and her friends advice whenever they needed it. Hey, I’d rather they learned from me than from their friends or somebody on TV. I remember one of the girls’ mothers asking me if I minded her daughter being at our house all the time.
“Hey, I better ask you this: do you mind her being over here all the time?” I said. “Because if they bring up a topic, there is nothing taboo in this house. If they want to ask me about sex, I’m going to tell them how it is.”
One night, I warned the girls about the dangers of drinking alcohol.
I called the three girls into our kitchen, where I filled one glass with water and another one with whiskey. Then I placed a worm in each of the glasses. The worm in the water lived, while the worm in the whiskey shriveled up and died.
“What does that tell you?” I asked them.
“Well, I won’t have worms like a dog if I drink alcohol,” Trasa said.
It wasn’t exactly the lesson I was going for.
Sometimes Trasa’s sleepovers didn’t go so smoothly, either. One night, Christine left me with a handful of ten-year-old girls while she went to a friend’s house to play bridge.
“Whatever you do, do not let these girls leave this house,” Christine said.
A couple of hours later, one of Trasa’s friends came downstairs.
“I need to go home,” she said.
“Nope, you’re not going anywhere,” I told her. “Go back upstairs.”
A few minutes later, the girl was standing in the living room again.
“Mr. Robertson, I really need to go home,” she said. “I was supposed to be home an hour ago.”
“Hey, I’m under strict orders from headquarters,” I said. “Nobody leaves this house.”
About an hour later, there was a knock at the front door. It was a lady who lived down the street.
“Is my daughter here?” she asked.
“Nope,” I said. “I haven’t seen her.”
Then the little girl stuck her head around the corner.
“Momma, I’ve been trying to come home,” she said. “But he won’t let me leave!”
In October 1992, the army transferred me back to the United States. Trasa was in her senior year of high school, and we made the difficult decision to leave our seventeen-year-old daughter with coworkers and friends in Germany. I didn’t want to be away from my daughter for a year, but I knew it was the best thing for her. We’d always talked about what happened to me during my senior year of high school, when my parents moved from Dixie, Louisiana, to Gonzales, Louisiana. I had to move schools during the middle of my senior year and graduated with people I didn’t know. I was determined not to do that to my children. We talked to Trasa about it, and she understood the situation and was very grateful we were leaving her behind. It was a very long year without her.
Trasa was attending Zweibrucken American High School in Zweibrucken, Germany, which was located on a United States Air Force base. The school also served the children of troops stationed at two nearby army facilities. It was an exceptional school, and she received a fantastic education. When Trasa graduated from high school in 1993, she received a Presidential Scholarship to Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. In high school she was named a student delegate to the United Nations and visited the Hague in the Netherlands. As a National Merit Scholar she was invited to the White House in Washington, DC, where she met First Lady Hillary Clinton. We couldn’t have been more proud of her.
She also excelled at Texas A&M. During Trasa’s sophomore year of college, one of her close friends was working as a fashion model. She invited Tras
a to attend one of her photo shoots, and the modeling agency became interested in Trasa. She eventually became a model in advertisements around the country. I was so happy for her. Until Trasa was fifteen, she never felt like she was pretty. But she really blossomed by the end of high school. As a child, Trasa wore Coke-bottle eyeglasses. When Trasa was eight years old, we were told she would probably be blind by the time she was twenty-one. I told her we wouldn’t worry about it, and god would take care of everything. It was a hereditary condition. Christine’s father was legally blind in one eye until he had laser surgery when he was much older. Fortunately, Trasa’s vision gradually improved, and she was able to wear contact lenses by the time she was fifteen.
Trasa graduated from Texas A&M in 1997. She took a year off from school between her junior and senior years because she was starting to get burned out. She spent a year working as a model and waitressing and really enjoyed it, then returned to Texas A&M the next year to finish her bachelor’s degree. She was offered a scholarship to attend law school at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, but turned it down; she had other plans for her life.
Trasa met her future husband, Kyle Cobern, during her freshman year at Texas A&M. He is nine years older than Trasa, and they’ve been married for seventeen years now. Kyle is perfect for our daughter, and that’s really all any parent could ever want. Trasa now has four sons—Brady Silas, Caden, Jaxon, and McCrae—and she absolutely loves being a mother. She teaches middle school in Hurst, Texas, and loves what she’s doing. I couldn’t be more proud of and happy for her.
Looking back now, it’s amazing how much the good Lord has blessed us. For the first four years of our marriage, Christine and I weren’t sure we could have children. But as I said earlier, I put it in god’s hands. I knew I had to have faith in the Lord. As it says in Matthew 21:21, “Jesus replied, ‘Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, “Go, throw yourself into the sea,” and it will be done.’ ”
A couple of months after Trasa was born, Christine returned to her doctor for a routine checkup. She asked him if we could have another child.
“If I’d seen you before your first child, I would have told you that you could never have children,” he said. “If you had one, I don’t see why you can’t have another one.”
I knew if the Lord wanted us to have another child, then Trasa would soon have a brother or sister.
“You can’t tell by looking at me, but I’m a comedy man!”
I was a big fan of muscle cars when I was younger. This beauty required nearly as much oil as gas!
Like Father, Like Son
CHRISTINE WASN’T PREGNANT FOR ten days before she started having problems with our second baby. I like to joke that our son, Scott, was trouble before he was even born. Scott was born at a military hospital at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, on December 18, 1977.
After we returned to the United States from Germany in July 1977, I was stationed at Fort Lee, which is near Petersburg, Virginia, and Christine and Trasa went to stay with her parents in Kentucky. When the army transferred me to Fort Polk in Leesville, Louisiana, in September 1977, Christine’s parents brought them down to live with me. Two weeks later, Christine started having serious problems.
One morning, I woke up to go squirrel hunting. Hey, it was the first time I’d been back in Louisiana in a long time, and I couldn’t wait to go shoot the long-tailed critters! But for whatever reason, Christine didn’t want me to go hunting. “Why not?” I asked her.
“I don’t have a reason,” she said. “I just have a feeling that you’re not supposed to go.”
“That’s not good enough,” I said. “I’m going to shoot me some squirrels.”
When I came home from hunting, I found a note on our front door. Christine was at the hospital because of complications from her pregnancy, and Trasa was down the street at the preacher’s house. Doctors told Christine there was a serious problem with her pregnancy and broke the devastating news that her fetus would probably die. But a month went by and Christine didn’t miscarry, so the doctors took another ultrasound in October 1977. The fetus was still alive, and the doctors decided that when Christine was seven months pregnant, they would hospitalize her until our baby was born.
On the day after Thanksgiving Day 1977, Christine was admitted to the military hospital at Fort Polk, where she was supposed to stay for the next three months. But on December 8, 1977, Christine started having contractions. The next day, she was flown to San Antonio because there was an experimental drug there that doctors believed might be able to stop her contractions. Our baby wasn’t due until February 5, 1978. If the baby was born in December, there was a good chance he wouldn’t survive.
On December 17, Christine started hemorrhaging and doctors couldn’t stop the bleeding. They delivered our son, Scott, the next day. I was at Fort Polk when Christine started hemorrhaging, and the doctors called me and told me I needed to jump on the next flight to San Antonio. When I walked off the elevator at the hospital, I saw Christine walking down the hall. I looked at her and figured she hadn’t delivered the baby yet.
“I’ve already had the baby,” she said. “Come on, let’s go down and see him.”
“Hey, get out of here,” I said. “You haven’t had the baby.”
“Trust me,” she said. “I had the baby. Let’s go see your son.”
Scott was in critical care because he was seven weeks premature. You couldn’t really see him because there were so many tubes and wires sticking out of him. For years, Christine joked that Scott was the ugliest baby she’d ever seen! When Scott was born, Christine kind of went into a shell because she was convinced he wouldn’t survive. It was a very scary time for us. The doctors told us the biggest factor on Scott’s side was that he weighed five pounds, thirteen ounces when he was born. Even though Scott was born nearly two months premature, he was still a pretty good-sized baby.
When Scott was only three days old, I left to spend the night at a friend’s house. Before Christine went to bed, she liked to go down and see him in the neonatal intensive care unit. She liked to rub his stomach and tell him she loved him. But on the third night, she walked into the ICU and the nurses told her she needed to go back to her room. All of the nurses were around Scott. She knew something was wrong, so she called me and told me to come back to the hospital.
Before I got to the hospital, doctors operated on Scott because his liver wasn’t functioning properly. His bilirubin levels were critically high, and the doctors didn’t discover the problem until he was three days old. Bilirubin is a brownish-yellow substance found in bile. It is produced when the liver breaks down old red blood cells. Bilirubin is then removed from the body through feces and urine. When bilirubin levels are high, jaundice causes a baby’s skin and the whites of its eyes to turn yellow.
Scott was given a blood transfusion, and thankfully the Lord healed him.
When I arrived at the hospital that night, a doctor apologized to me for operating on my son without my permission.
“Hey, did he need it?” I asked.
“If we hadn’t operated on him, he would have died,” the doctor said.
“Then no apology is necessary,” I said.
Well, we found out a few years later that Scott’s high bilirubin levels had damaged part of his brain. Scott was suicidal from the time he was about five years old. His behavior was really erratic as a child. When Scott would get tired, he would throw his arms out and fall backward. When we were hunting hogs in Germany one time, Scott fell on the ground, which concerned the Germans who were hunting with us. “Hey, he does that all the time,” I told them. Scott would fall down wherever we went; he did it in stores, in school, and while we were walking down the sidewalk.
I never realized my son had serious problems. I don’t know if I’m hardheaded, I’m stubborn, or I just wanted to overlook it, but Christine kept telling me Scott ha
d real problems.
“Well, hey, then I had problems, too,” I said. “All kids have problems.”
It took me a while to realize Scott needed help. When Scott was angry, he was out of control and did a lot of damage. The tipping point came when he was eleven years old. He came home from school, and Christine could sense that he was very tense. His bedroom was his safe haven. He had to learn to never get angry outside of his bedroom. Well, Scott walked into his bedroom that day, closed the door, and proceeded to destroy everything. When it was finally quiet, Christine went into the room. Scott was getting ready to jump out a second-story window. I don’t know if the fall would have killed him, but it was straight down. Christine grabbed Scott and pulled him back into his room.
“I can’t go on,” Scott said. “I can’t do it. I just can’t. You’re my mother. You’re supposed to help me. Make the pain go away.”
It broke our hearts. Christine called the military hospital and we took him there the next morning. We met with a new military psychiatrist, and Scott was his very first patient. The psychiatrist told us there was a new drug on the market, and he wanted Scott to take it. The psychiatrist diagnosed Scott with having an attention disorder, hyperactivity, and a behavioral disorder.
The psychiatrist told us we wouldn’t see the effects of the new drug for ten to fourteen days. But on the third day, Scott got himself out of bed and walked into the kitchen for breakfast with a big smile on his face. We didn’t know who he was! From that day forward, Scott became a typical child. He never lost his temper and rarely had mood swings. He continued to see a psychiatrist until he was seventeen years old, but he never had serious emotional or behavioral problems again. We eventually figured out Scott was suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, which is a form of autism.
The military psychiatrist saved my son’s life. There’s no doubt in my mind that God had a hand in our finding the doctor who could control Scott’s disorders. It was another example of God taking care of us. It always seemed like when we desperately needed someone to help us, like when we were trying to get pregnant, God pointed us in the right direction and put people in our lives who could fix our problems. As it says in Proverbs 3:5–6, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”
