Author: Sharron Burnett

I had already experienced many life changing events when my beautiful daughter, Maryellen, was born. None of them felt equal to the impact of being a mother. I suddenly viewed the world and my future from a totally different perspective. I had felt responsible for my brothers after our father died. When my mother became ill I instinctively believed that I must be responsible for her care. I was devoted to Mike and dreamed of graduating and beginning a career. All of those things paled next the wonder of raising a child. It felt as though I had been given one of the greatest blessings ever granted to a woman and I wanted more that anything to be as awesome a mother as my own Mama had always been. 

I had fallen totally in love with my little girl. I was exhausted from lack of sleep as I adjusted to  to Maryellens’s schedule. Some nights I was barely able to drag myself from the bed when I heard her tiny cries. Once I was awake and snuggling with her in my arms I learned to love those nighttime moments when it felt as though we were the only two people on the earth. She was a cuddly and pleasant baby who did not seem to mind the inexperienced mistakes that I made as a new mother. The two of us stumbled along together as she more and more became the focus of both me and Mike. Her future was now more important to us than our own. 

Mike continued with his studies at college but I had decided to suspend my education for a time. I needed to learn how to care for a child and I was still checking on my mother as often as possible to be certain that she was well. Maryellen and I met many of our neighbors in the small apartment project where we lived whenever I took her out on the lawn to enjoy some fresh air and sunshine. I walked around the neighborhood pushing her in her stroller. The older people who lived there always smiled and waved as we passed them on our daily journey. Life was slow and happy, mostly without incident which felt good given the challenges of the recent past. 

Mike had grown close to two of his fellow teaching assistants, Egon and Marita. Egon was a brilliant student from Germany who almost instantly became like a brother to Mike. Marita was from Chicago and a graduate of St. Thomas University. The three of them were a trio in the Sociology Department of the University of Houston. Over time they would also come to visit with me and Maryellen. They were both taken by our beautiful daughter and it soon became apparent that they were taken by each other as well.

Christmas Eve at Grandma Ulrich’s house was quite special as Mike and I showed off our five month old daughter. She was the center of attention as my aunts and uncles and cousins played with her. The family was growing. Alan and Susan had a two year old daughter named Carla. My cousin Jack had married a Susan of his own and the two of them brought their one year old daughter, Shelley, to the festivities. My cousin, Sandra, who was sixteen like my brother, Pat, had bloomed into a beautiful and poised young woman. I found myself thinking of how proud her father, my Uncle Bob, would have been of her. Obviously Aunt Claudia beamed as everyone marveled at Sandra’s loveliness. The party was a magnificent celebration of the  incredible family that had supported me and my brothers and my mother in the dozen years since my father had died.  

As nineteen seventy one dawned Mike was beginning to question his plan to become a college professor. He did not enjoy the interchange of teaching like I did. Furthermore, he was eager to be a provider for his growing family. An opportunity to work at one of Houston’s largest downtown banks part time convinced him that it was time to get more serious about life. When his boss offered him a full time position, he jumped at the change and suddenly his destiny changed. 

Ironically his buddies Egon and Marita had come to similar conclusions about how to spend the rest of their lives. They had fallen in love and were ready to settle down more permanently, so they too found work and abandoned the idea of being professors of Sociology. Instead they began to speak of marriage and the possibilities of having a family of their own. No doubt each of us was anxious to settle down as the fate of the nation continued to feel so chaotic with the War in Vietnam seeming to be unending and protests against the conflict becoming more and more dangerous with students being killed at Kent State University. The outside world felt unhinged and it seemed important to find happiness and stability wherever possible. 

Mike’s salary was good enough to allow us to move to an apartment with two bedrooms instead of only one. It would be nice to give Maryellen room to play while we had our privacy again. With the help of my brothers we simply carted our belongings across the parking lot and enjoyed arranging them in our larger space. Somehow this little move made us feel as though we were making progress as adults. I celebrated my twenty first birthday and felt as though I had officially crossed into adulthood even though I had already had so many adult experiences. 

Shockingly tragedy struck our family once again when we learned that Sandra had died. She had appeared to be in the peak of health when she was suddenly stricken while at school. Doctors found that she had an aneurysm that had been probably been in her brain from the time of her birth. After a brief stay in the hospital she succumbed to her condition. We were all devastated beyond any description that words might convey. She was only sixteen, two months younger than my brother, Pat. She was the daughter of my favorite uncle, my father’s best friend who had died so young. I grieved intensely for my Aunt Claudia because I now understand the intensity of love that a mother has for her child. It made me ever more protective of my own sweet Maryellen. 

When summer came we celebrated Maryellen’s first birthday with friends and family. As we all sang happily to the little girl who had brought so much joy into our lives I silently felt grateful that my mother was doing so well. It had been two years since her bout with mental illness and I had actually come to believe that she was indeed cured of her depression. She was enjoying her job and seeming more and more like herself. Mike was doing well at the bank and my brothers were advancing into their own adulthood. 

Just as I was lulled into believing that perhaps only blue skies were ahead my Uncle Andrew died. He was still a very young man in his forties when he suffered a massive heart attack on his way to set up a business selling historic coins. I worried that my mother would lose the momentum of her recovery from depression, but somehow she handled his death as well as anyone. She would often relate the moment when she told my Grandma Ulrich that her son was gone. Mama said that a single tear rolled down my grandmother’s cheek, an image that I have never forgotten. It was especially poignant to me now that I had a child of my own. Somehow I felt my grandmother’s pain and understood her just a bit more than I ever had. I was now firmly ensconced in the role of being a mother. 

I was shaken after my mother’s bout with mental illness. I hoped that we would all return to a kind of normalcy and we actually did for a time. I was still taking college courses and Mike was attempting to earn an advanced degree. My brother, Michael, entered his senior at Jesse Jones High School where he was proving his mettle in mathematics and science. Pat had entered high school as well. Meanwhile Mama was working as a substitute teacher while searching for a full time job. Each of us kept moving forward even as we had been quite affected by the events surrounding Mama’s bout with mental illness. Somehow our lives would never again be quite the same.

In November, shortly before I celebrated my twenty first birthday I learned that I was pregnant. The news brought great joy to all of us and gave us something wonderful to think about. In particular Mama seemed to be more elated than she had been for many months. Her uptick in mood eventually gave her the confidence to embark on a new job at the University of Texas Health Science Center where she would work on a long term blood pressure research project. She had begun to question her stamina for teaching and so it was good to see her moving in a new direction. Little did any of us know how important her new job would ultimately become for her mental health. 

Nineteen seventy would prove to be a good year for all of us even though the Vietnam War was not going well and protests broke out on college campuses all over the country. Because I was carrying a child I became less and less involved with the politics of college. Instead I hunkered down to become more and more serious about the direction I wanted my life to take. I was in a nesting mood, planning for the arrival of my first born child. 

In that year there were no ultrasounds being used to determine whether a woman was carrying a boy or a girl baby. The reveal would not take place until the day of birth, so most items purchased ahead of time were generic in nature, suitable for either boys or girls. Since we were in the dark, we also had to choose two potential names for the child which took some imagination and compromise before we finally decided how our little one would be addressed. If it was a girl we would name her Maryellen after our two mothers, Mary and Ellen. If it was a boy he would be known as Thomas. 

That spring Michael graduated from high school as the Valedictorian and announced that he had been accepted to Rice University on a full scholarship. He would study Electrical Engineering. We were so excited for him and intensely proud that he had done so well. He and Pat worked that summer at a roadside produce stand on Mykawa Road, carefully saving their money for the fund that they had been creating years before. Their plan was to pool their resources to purchase a used car that they might share. It was difficult to believe that they had grown up so much because I still thought of them as the two baby boys who came to live with us so long before. 

As my summer time due date approached I became enormous in size. Friends let me borrow maternity clothes which back then tended to be unfitted loose dresses that easily allowed room for my expanding girth. Generally one size fit all. By the end of June I was overdue and feeling miserable with feet so swollen that I was barely able to stuff my sausage like feet into a pair of shoes. I was also having difficulty walking due to a pain in my left hip that made each step send a stabbing shock up and down my leg. It was a very hot time to boot. Nonetheless I waited patiently for the baby to grace us with an entrance into the world.

The generosity of family and friends had filled our one bedroom apartment with diapers, clothing, blankets, a high chair, a stroller, a baby bed, a playpen, children’s books, and all sorts of toys and accoutrements associated with the care and feeding of a tiny person. I was anxious to welcome my little one into our world, but it would not be until mid July that my contractions would begin. Unfortunately my doctor was out of town vacationing so I would end up spending my hours in labor with a doctor that I had never before met. I was left mostly to myself in a darkened room wondering if the staff had forgotten me.

I spent the next eighteen hours having regular contractions that seemed to be going nowhere. I was literally beginning to wonder if I would ultimately be sent back home like the woman who had been moaning incessantly in the room next door. I was shocked when one of my nurses explained that the lady’s contractions had stopped and so she was no longer there. I worried that all of the pain I was feeling would end of being be for naught. I wished that the staff would at least let Mike come to visit with me, but their policy was to keep untrained folks at bay.

My entire family had gathered in a waiting room where they discussed the future of the child who was about to enter their lives. Pat proclaimed that if it was a boy he would take the youngster fishing. If it was a girl he would escort her to her first dance. Everyone was overjoyed and full of anticipation. I was becoming more and more certain that the baby was somehow stuck inside. I actually began to drift off and on into sleep. 

Finally in the early morning hours of July 18, 1970, the doctor and nurses wheeled me to the delivery room where a beautiful nine pound two and a half ounce little girl made her grand entrance into our world. She was beautifully perfect and so large and well formed that everyone agreed that she was long overdo. I was ecstatic but exhausted so the doctor gave me something to sleep and after briefly sharing my joy with Mike I fell into a deep slumber that was only interrupted at feeding time. Maryellen Burnett would change us all for the better from those first moments of her life. It was a beautiful new beginning. 

My first efforts to quell the ravages of my mother’s mind were fraught with misunderstandings, mistakes, a total lack of knowledge about mental illness. We hide such things in darkened rooms. Few people wish to even hear about psychosis, paranoia, deep depression much less openly discuss such diseases emanating from the brain. We have all too often shamed and spurned those whose minds break down. Finding help for loved ones suffering from such illnesses is all too often a far too difficult task. Loneliness is the partner of mental illness. 

In the summer of 1969, I found myself facing one of the greatest challenges of my life when my mother drifted into a fog of depression so severe that she was rendered incapable of even discerning reality from paranoid contortions of her mind. I was up to that point a rather naive and unsophisticated soul. I had never before encountered anyone with a mental illness. I knew little or nothing about what to do for someone so deeply melancholy as my mother now was. 

When I contacted my aunts and uncles for advice I soon realized that they were as baffled as I was. They were reluctant to do more than come to visit her and then shake their heads in confusion when I asked what we might do together to help her become well again. Their comments urging her to pull herself together were as fruitless as the medication that Dr. Jorns had previously prescribed for her. The food that they brought to her ended up in the trash because of her fears that it was poisoned. She was in deep pain from her very legitimate illness and I soon realized that I would have to be the person to find a treatment for her. 

I called Dr. Jorns again and when I described her worsening symptoms he agreed that she needed more expert help than he would be able to provide. He gave me the names of two trusted psychiatrists and suggested that I contact one of them, noting that I would not go wrong with either one. I randomly called the first one on the list without any real knowledge of his education or reputation. I had to simply trust that Dr. Jorns was not misleading me. 

The doctor had a clinic with his father and brother in the Memorial Baptist Hospital that used to be in downtown Houston. When I described Mama’s behavior to him he urged me to bring her to the emergency room of the hospital and get her admitted. He would treat her from there. 

While he made the task sound simple I already knew that it would take some slight of hand to get my mother to agree to such a plan. I enlisted her long time friend, Mrs. Barry, to help me. Together the two of us convinced Mama that she needed to see a doctor so that she might feel better. I explained that Dr. Jorns had suggested that she see a specialist at Memorial Baptist Hospital and that he might want her to rest in the hospital for a time. While she initially quashed the idea, I was determined to get her there one way or another, so I talked her into submission. 

The following day Mrs. Barry drove me and Mama to the hospital. The doctor with whom I had spoken had already alerted the admissions department that Mama would be coming. They were ready with the paperwork that had to be completed. That created the first dustup as Mama became suspicious of all of the personal information they wanted from her. Ultimately I had to finish all of the documents and when my mother refused to sign any of them I was the one who placed my name on each page. 

The whole process was exhausting to both me and my mother. Mama began to feel so weak that she protested very little when a nurse took her to a room in a wheelchair. She was greatly confused by then and I suspect she was feeling betrayed by me and Mrs. Barry as well. Nonetheless she had very little fight left in her when the nurse gave her some medication to calm her down. She was soon sleeping deeply for the first time in many days. 

I learned to drive on the freeway to downtown in the weeks that followed. I visited my mother daily and saw progress even as I sensed that somehow my relationship with her was now strained. I knew that she loved me and hoped that she realized that everything I had done was also out of love, but she was never able to admit that she did indeed have a mental illness. It would be a bone of contention for the rest of her life. Sadly at the time neither of us understood that her illness was chronic. I hoped that it was a once in a lifetime event precipitated by the traumas that she had endured and triggered by the stress and disappointments of the teaching position that had overwhelmed her along with the difficult relationship she had with her mentally abusive man friend. 

When Mama finally came home she was better, but shaken by the experience. She insisted that her doctor had assured her that she was cured and would never again endure such an horrific experience. Her next goal was to find another job. Mine was to return to the University of Houston to work toward my degree. It had been a difficult summer but I was optimistic that better times lay ahead for me and Mike and for my mother and brothers as well. 

Perhaps the best news was that my mother finally had the determination to end her relationship with the man who had in many ways contributed to her fears and melancholy. It was easier than she had thought, but what she never knew is that her brothers had visited with him when I told them how he had been treating her. They essentially suggested quite strongly that the man would have to deal with them if he continued to harass Mama. He got the message and the bravado he had used to manipulate her disappeared. I was relieved to know that we would never have to see him again nor hear his boasts about knowing powerful people who were willing to use violence to change the face of our nation. We all had a second chance to restart the next chapter of our lives without the yoke of negativity weighing us down. My optimism and determination returned. Better yet I now had proof that I was capable of accepting adult responsibilities. It was time to get serious.

Nineteen sixty nine would become a turning point in my life, an unexpected reckoning that demanded that I become courageous and mature. I began the last year of the sixties as a ridiculously naive young bride who still felt uncertain about being an adult even as I posed as a confident woman. I was finally driving, but only on the quiet side streets of the city of Houston. I had yet to enter the freeways that were slowly but surely defining the growing city. I spent time taking classes at the University of Houston and caring for my new home with Mike. The two of us often visited our parents and when around them I mostly still felt like a child, especially under the confident eye of my mother-in-law, Mary. Nonetheless I struck a pose intended to hide my own anxieties about mapping out my future for more than one day at a time. 

When I was alone with Mike I felt as though we were a powerful team, but at other times the world seemed so uncertain. I knew all too well how quickly hopes and dreams can change from my father’s death. I was often reticent to look too far in the future. The war in Vietnam was still raging. Young men who had attended Mt. Carmel High School when I was a student there had died. Others were actively fighting in the jungles of a faraway place. Still others had volunteered to serve in the Navy, the Air Force, the Army, the Marines. The draft hovered over the heads of virtually every young man of a certain age. There were no guarantees that life would go according to a predetermined plan. 

The summer of nineteen sixty nine was one of great excitement in Houston, Texas. The final plans for a manned journey to the moon were underway. The dreams of travel to the moon that had so enchanted my brother, Michael, were soon to become a reality. The enthusiastic predictions of my science teacher, Mrs. Colby, were finally taking place. The whole city was abuzz with anticipation and Mike had become a part of the preparations through his Uncle Bob. That summer there was much electric work to be done at NASA and Fisk Electric Company was heavily involved. Uncle Bob had brought Mike into the process as an electrician’s helper. In that capacity Mike spent hours each week crawling under the floor of Mission Control pulling cables to supply electricity to the massive computers and screens that would communicate with the astronauts on their historic journey. 

The workload was enormous and Mike sometimes labored into the early morning hours. Other times he came home to sleep for a few hours and then quickly returned to NASA. His Uncle Bob who lived in the Heights neighborhood of Houston picked Mike up for each of their shifts. That left me with the car and lots of time alone, so I often went to visit my mother who was struggling a bit over the disappointment of not being asked to return to her job as a teacher at Eliot Elementary for the next school year. While her time there had initially been fantastic, the spring semester had been particularly difficult when a new very troubled student had come to her classroom. Additionally, she was still indecisive about the man that she had been dating and his tendencies to demean and dominate her. Her usual optimism was missing.

Mike was making very good money that summer so my usual worries about adhering to a budget and saving money had dissipated. I attempted to cheer up my mother by taking her to the annual Gulfgate Mall moonlight madness sale where we searched for great bargains amongst throngs of people who came from all over the city for the annual extravaganza. It was a glorious setting for female bonding and Mama was usually the life of the occasion, but in 1969, she was obviously feeling distracted. The same thing occurred when we went to see movies. Nothing seemed to bring her joy, which was so uncharacteristic. Not even the historic walk on the moon seemed to lighten her spirits, but I assumed her dark mood was just a passing thing. 

By August, my mother had taken to her bed. She pulled the curtains and blinds tightly closed and lay in the dark in stifling heat. She was afraid to open the windows to let air into the house but also refused to turn on the one air conditioner that hung in the living room window. Her eyes darted in fear as she attempted to explain that unknown forces were attempting to accuse her of heinous crimes. She warned me to be very careful because our family was being watched. I had never before seen or heard her like this and I became quite worried. Eventually I managed to convince her to let me take her to see Dr. Jorns.

We went to the doctor’s clinic without an appointment. He had been our family doctor for years and I had worked for him in the summer. I knew that he would see my mother even though we did not have an appointment. As we waited for what seemed forever my mother began to look weaker and weaker. She was a shell of herself with trembling hands, sallow cheeks and dark circles under her eyes. Even Dr. Jorns was surprised when he saw her. He gently attempted to ease the fears that she described to him and then gave her a prescription for medication designed to calm her frayed nerves. 

Somehow I thought that visit would perform a miracle and that the medication would return my mother to her normal state. Over the ensuing days her paranoia only increased and not even visits from her brothers and sisters soothed her mind. It felt as though we were losing her hour by hour. I would eventually have to shed my youth and become the rock for our family that my mother had always been. The years of caring for a family alone had taken their toll. She needed help and I would have to be the one to find it for her. Like the young men my age becoming men in war, I too had battles to fight and it was time to gird my loins and say goodbye to being a little girl.

I was back at work early Tuesday morning after a whirlwind  honeymoon in New Orleans. Since we had only one car, an ancient Dodge that had once belonged to Mike’s grandmother, he dropped me off at the school each morning still urging me to take a driving test soon. I managed to work even as my mind was more focused on getting our apartment set up to be more livable. For much of the week I spent my evenings hanging pictures, arranging the bits of furniture that we had accumulated and organizing the kitchen and linen closet. 

Mike and I had purchased a sofa for under a hundred dollars at FedMart, one of the early versions of a big box discount store. It was a burnt orange color which was one of the popular hues of the day along with avocado green and gold. Many gift items for my kitchen echoed that trend, dating them as artifacts from the sixties to this very day. 

Mike’s mother had bought us a rocking chair which added extra seating to our living room. Alan and Susan gave us their old formica topped table with metal chairs for our dining nook. Mike brought the furniture from his bedroom that included a student desk, a double bed and a dresser. His parents also gave him an old television that sometimes behaved and sometimes had a tendency to flip and roll or become fuzzy. It worked just well enough to suit our needs. In our thinking we had exactly what we required to be comfortable. Best of all it was the first time that I had lived in a place with central air conditioning. In the humid heat of Houston, Texas that was a big win for a girl who had always slept with the windows open and the attic fan attempting to pull enough air inside to create a breeze.

We soon learned that our strict budget often became stressed when emergencies arose. There were times when our dinner consisted of boiled cabbage with canned pineapple for dessert. We were young enough to laugh at our folly and simply carry on until the monthly checks for our work arrived. Mama knowingly had a tendency to present us with a bag of groceries whenever we came to visit. Mike’s mom sometimes gave us packages of meat from the stash that she stored in her freezer or slipped a twenty dollar bill into one of Mike’s pockets. We timed our visits around meal times more often than not. Even Alan and Susan came to our rescue with invitations to Saturday feasts of Susan’s incredible cooking. 

Our sacrifices felt minimal to me. My mother had taught me to have gratitude for having a roof over my head, a warm bed in which to sleep safely at night, and a loving family by my side. As long as we made it from one day to the next and kept moving toward our goals together I was happy. In fact I enjoyed the challenge of that first year of wedded bliss. I suppose that those will always remain some of the happiest of my days.  

I finally screwed up enough courage to take the driver’s test. I had turned twenty years old and felt that I was long overdue in that regard. My first attempt went magnificently until I hit the orange cones while attempting to parallel park. The officer shook his head and bluntly announced that I would have to come back another day to try again. 

At first I felt totally defeated, but I’ve always had a stubborn determination in the face of challenges, so not long thereafter I was jumping through the hoops of the exam again. I froze as I approached the final leg of the test which was parallel parking. Mike had told me that the important thing was not to hit the cones, so when I realized that I was about to fail again I abruptly stopped and announced that I would probably have to practice some more because I felt incapable of parking properly. The kind officer asked me how old I was and shook his head when I told him I was twenty and that I had failed the test before. He sat quietly for a moment and then asked how often I might need to park a car between two other vehicles on the street. When I acknowledged that such a thing would rarely if ever happen he announced that he was going to give me a passing mark with the proviso  that I never try to parallel park unless I was certain I would not damage another car. To this day I have never attempted to park in such a situation. 

Mike was able to vote in the presidential election that year, but I was still shy of being twenty one and the voting age had not yet been lowered. Richard Nixon handily defeated Hubert Humphrey who had received the nomination of the Democratic party almost by default after the death of Robert Kennedy. Neither Mike nor I were fans of Nixon but his election had appeared to be inevitable so we were not surprised by his victory. The Vietnam War was very much on our minds, dominating the worries that we had. The mood in the country was tense and uncertain after a year defined by upheaval. Meanwhile Mike and I were happy inside a bubble of our own making as we charted our future together. 

In December we attended the wedding of our friends Linda and Bill. It was a beautiful ceremony just as I knew it would be. Bill was still in the army so the two of them were soon on their way to Germany where they would enjoy an adventurous beginning to their own love story. It seemed that so many of us Boomers were rapidly becoming adults and facing challenges not unlike those our parents had endured. Somehow we all rose to the occasion. 

When Christmas came that year we struggled to purchase gifts for our family members and each other. We found a small “Charlie Brown” Christmas tree that we decorated with makeshift ornaments and a single string of lights. Our budget was so tight that we literally debated whether or not to purchase a manger scene for five dollars. In the end we took a leap of faith and invested in the creche that we have continued to place under our holiday trees over the years. It remains a precious reminder of the joy and love that we found together.