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- [00:01]
Apple Representative
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- [00:30]
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- [01:32]
Sarah Austin Janess
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Sarah Austin, Janess, the Moth's executive producer here in the United States. Mother's Day is just around the corner. So on today's podcast, we're sharing three favorite Moth stories about moms. First up is Donna Edwards. Donna told this story at a Moth slam in Houston, and the theme that night was Love Hurts. Here's Donna Edwards live at the Moth.
- [01:56]
Donna Edwards
Okay, this is my first time and there's a lot of you. Okay. I was in this relationship with this woman that I was madly in love with. Five years after the relationship, she came to me and she told me that she wanted to have a baby. And I was like, huh? You don't want me to have this baby? And she's like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm the oldest, I should have it. And I'm like, yes, yes. She goes, will you be willing to go through this for me? And I sit there for a minute and I went, yeah, you know I really love you.
- [02:28]
Apple Representative
Yes.
- [02:29]
Donna Edwards
I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Yes. Well, for three years she tried her best to have a baby and couldn't. We went through in vitro, we harvest her eggs, we did everything. And one day she came to me and she goes, we're not going to have a child. And I said, well, I'm really sorry that we're not going to have a child, but we'll be okay. I'm a kid for all of us. It'll be okay. Well, then my best friend had my godson, and I got the privilege of being in the room. And when his little head came out and I was standing there watching all of it, you know, thinking I was going to throw up, but I didn't. And I went home that evening and I told the love of my life that I would try and have a child for us. And she was ecstatic. She's like, are you serious? And believe it or not, I am the butch one in the family. And I said, yes, I can do this. All my butch friends were like, what the fuck? And I'm like, yeah, I was surprised, too. So I go in to the doctors, and we tell our doctor, you know, Donna's gonna try. And he even said, what the fuck? And I'm like, I can do this. I am a strong human being. Even though I never wanted anything moving inside of me. That was a little gross. But I figured I wouldn't get pregnant. She didn't. Well, I got pregnant on the second try. So she's begging me that morning to pee on the stick. I'm like, fine. Fine, fine, fine. I go in there and I pee. And I said, so how many lines are we supposed to have? And she went, two. And I went, oh, fuck. And she went, how many lines are there?
- [04:20]
Rachel Ollerenshaw
I went, two.
- [04:22]
Donna Edwards
And I sat there for a minute and I thought, oh, my God, Can I actually do this? I didn't have a very good mother. She left me when I was five. You can only imagine the panic that went through me. But I looked at this woman and I thought, wow, I love you. I will do this. So, you know, pregnancy, they start kicking, they start moving. You start peeing everywhere because they've decided to lay somewhere. And the day comes and the doctor tells me, you cannot have this naturally. And I'm like, well, why not? He says, your coochie's not big enough. I'm like, huh?
- [05:02]
Rachel Ollerenshaw
What?
- [05:02]
Donna Edwards
He goes, your baby head big. It won't come through there. I said, okay, okay, so what does this mean? He goes, we're going to cut you open. I went, oh, hell, no. I said, serious? And he went, serious. So we scheduled a date. Friends gathered around, but only two of us could go in, thank God. So they cut this child out of me, and they show her to me, and it's the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life with all this little white gook on it. And I'm like, damn, could you clean it? And then it started crying. And that was the beautifulest cry I'd ever heard in my life. But then they had to take it because I got some gestational diabetes and shit. So they had to take it to the nicu. So I'm not really good on pain medication. I don't like drugs. So about 7:30 I had the baby at 9:00 in the morning, 7:30 came around, I'm like, where the hell is my baby? Because every baby that went by and it started crying, my partner would jump up, I'd go, that's not it, that's not it. Well, at around 7:30 I heard her coming into the room. It was a great experience. They laid her in my arms and I tried to breastfeed. I am truly a dyke. I had no milk, so we had to give her formula.
- [06:36]
Alexandra Rosas
Well.
- [06:40]
Donna Edwards
About two years old, my partner looks at me and she says, I'm not in love with you anymore. She quit her job, she stayed home. I worked, provided for the family. And she tells me one day she's not in love with me anymore. And I'm like, how can this be? I've always promised myself that if I ever had a child, I would stay with the woman that I had the child with. Well, that didn't work out. But when I was, I told her that I'm going to have to leave. And she's like, no, we can be roommates. And I'm like, no, I don't think I could spend the rest of my life being with a woman who's not in love with me. And she looked at me and she goes, you're going to leave the baby, right? I went, no, I'm the bitch with the scar.
- [07:28]
Rachel Ollerenshaw
Thank you.
- [07:36]
Sarah Austin Janess
Donna Edwards is a plumbing and medical gas designer. She works in hospitals all over the United States and has lived in Houston for the past 20 years. These days Donna co parents with her daughter's other mother and she wrote to tell us that her daughter is 15 now and a perfectly well adjusted young lady. Up next, we have a story from Rachel Ollerenshaw. Rachel shared her story at a slam in London where the theme of the night was celebration. Here's Rachel live from London.
- [08:09]
Rachel Ollerenshaw
On the 24th of June 2011. When I decided to celebrate my daughter Molly's eight years of life. We had a sort of party, if you want to call it that where all of her friends came and lots of people came, but they weren't invited. And it goes back to probably three months earlier and maybe even five years earlier, where, if you can imagine, in March, before that, my husband and I decided to pick my daughter up, Molly, from school early and take her out of school and take her somewhere and have a chat with her. And this chat wasn't your average chat. This chat was a chat to say, actually, Molly, you've been fighting cancer for the last four and a half years and we've got to the point where we can't do anything more. And can you imagine having to tell your 8 year old daughter this? And we were always very honest with Molly and Molly was a very bright little girl. And so we said to her, molly, you have three choices. You can either have some more chemotherapy, it's not going to make you better this time, it's just going to give you a little bit more time, or you could be part of clinical trials. And she very quickly turned around to me and said, mum, I don't want to be a guinea pig, or you could do Nothing. A Molly, 8 years old, and you think, how can an 8 year old make a decision about life? But she did and she came to me two days later and she said, actually, I've decided, I don't want anything more. You have to understand, Molly had had four and a half years of all sorts of different treatments, stem cell transplants, she'd had all sorts of operations, blood transfusions, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, everything and anything. So she came to me and said, I don't want to do anything more, I've had enough of hospitals, I don't want to do it. So for those three months, basically, we celebrated a life. And Molly chose different things that she wanted to do within that time. And this is a hugely humbling experience as a parent. And she did all sorts of things, like she did an awards ceremony, an Oscar ceremony for her friends to celebrate her funniest friend, her most sportiest friend, and all sorts of different things like that. She had wonderful days out and did many fantastical things, but small things and simple things. And suddenly when you get faced with those decisions in life, actually you realize how precious it is and how much you need to celebrate life. And so actually, on the 24th of June, 2011 is the day of Molly's funeral and you find yourself in a position where you're celebrating a life with lots of friends and kids that don't quite get it, and yet it's really special. And really important. And I always thought, can she really get this? And actually after, when we told her these three choices in life, we were on the way to a party because the bizarre thing is when you're actually terminally ill, you still look fine, you can still do lots of things. We were on the way to a party for her friends at a leisure centre near to us. And we were driving along talking about everything and anything, and Molly turned to me and she said, mum, when I'm gone, can you make sure that Maeve, her little sister, if she has children, can you make sure they get my Flower Fairies book? And as a mum, I was obviously streaming with tears, thinking, oh my God, my daughter completely gets it. I'd never have thought that an 8 year old could comprehend life and death so simply. And in the next breath she said to me, now can you make sure you look like you haven't been crying when we get to the party? And I'm like, yeah, okay, fine, fine, you know, trying to compose myself. So really my story is about celebrating life. And from that moment on I thought, if Molly can do it at 8 years old, if she can celebrate life and get on with it, then so can I. And actually that's hopefully what we go on and do. And I have two other lovely children that actually, rather than dwell on what we haven't got, hopefully we can celebrate what we have got. So, you know, my story is about a celebration of life. However short or long it may be, it's very precious.
- [12:39]
Sarah Austin Janess
That was Rachel Olorencio. Rachel is a mom to three children, Ben, Molly and Maeve. She's also co founder of the charity Molly Ollie's Wishes, which supports children with life threatening illnesses. To date, Molly Ollie's Wishes has raised over 1.6 million pounds and has helped thousands of children by granting wishes, giving them therapeutic stuffed animals named Ollie the Brave and two books, Ollie the Brave and the Wigglies and Ollie Being Brave and chemotherapy. For photos of Rachel, Molly and the rest of the family and info about Molly Ollie's wishes, please Visit our website, themoth.org before we go, we have time for one more story. This comes to us from Alexandra Rosas by way of our Madison, Wisconsin slangs. The theme that night was Love hurts. And to close us out, here's Alexandra Rosas.
- [13:36]
Alexandra Rosas
So there's a phrase that professional organizers use. It's called action prone. Action prone is when you ruthlessly disown and declutter and discard everything. I am not action prone. I am action resistant. So my husband And I were getting ready to move into a bigger house and I was fighting it all the way. We have three kids and there was so much that we had to get rid of. And I understand it, we were not going to use our new house as a storage unit. So I had to get rid of everything. But he was action prone. I mean, he was going through everything. Like somebody told him they stuck a million dollars in the house and he was going to find it. So he gets into the family room and he looks like Mark, I'm sorry, I know you're here, but he looks like a windmill. I mean, he is just tearing stuff off. But when his hand reaches for the Little Bear dvd, I freak out. No, not Little Bear. And he looks at me and he looks at me and he uses that voice that you hear in the movies when somebody's about to jump off the ledge of a building. And you know, moving is stressful. So he's trying to talk me down and he's like, honey, it's Little Bear. I know it's Little Bear. It's all about Little Bear. I know it's Little Bear. So we start arguing about Little Bear because this is what you fight about when you've been married 10 years. So he's trying to get me to get rid of everything and I can't get rid of it. Because what he can't hear in my action resistant insanity is that Little Bear is where I learned how to mother. Now, my mother came to this country, had to work a full time job, two part time jobs. She was a single mother with six kids and she was scared. She was so scared that if she was a burden in any way, America would send her back. Her children would have to stay here and she'd be gone. So she worked. She gave us everything we needed. I mean, we never ran out of toilet paper. Think about that. All these people in this house, how did she do it? She just. There was nothing that we ever needed. But I didn't know how to mother. So I would put in Little Bear. And whatever Little Bear's mother did, I did for that day with my kids. Mud pies in the woods, painting outside, surprise cakes. I mean, I did all this stuff that Little Bear did. And it sounds so stupid, but it was the only way that I knew how to do anything. So my kids will be brokenhearted if they ever knew this story because they're thinking, I'm this awesome mom. And actually I would just qu in Little Bear and was like, ah, I know what we're doing. Today we're making pancakes in the name and the shape of your initials. So one morning, that's exactly what I was doing. Little Bear's mother had made L and B for Little Bear. So I was going through my kids, Alexander and Xavier and Augie. You know, I was making their pancakes and I heard my kids talking about me. One said, she's obsessed with us. I hear another voice, she needs a life. The third one, how can we get her to find another hobby? That hurt. I was doing everything for them that I had longed for as a kid. But how do your kids know what you bring into their lives? They don't know you before you are their mother. What I had, I had everything for my mom. But I had an ache for her. I was too young to understand the language of providing. She provided, but what I ached for was her. Now that I'm a mother, I realize that as much as I wanted her, she wanted us, too. So I'm listening to my kids and I'm right at that point where you have to make a decision how you're going to handle it. You either start saving money so that they're in therapy for the rest of their lives, or you talk to them honestly. And I try to explain to them I'm doing what I wished I would have had as a kid. So I read an article that said that our DNA, our parents experience, is carried in our DNA. I also believe that as the DNA is carried forward, we can pull it back so that every time I touch my kids, every. Every time I tell them I love you, my mother gets to feel through my hands what she missed the first time around. Love hurts, but love also heals. And if my mother were alive today, she'd say, mija, you were right to fight for that Little Bear dvd because we needed that Little Bear in our lives. Thank you.
- [19:28]
Sarah Austin Janess
That's Alexandra Rosas. Alexandra is a first generation American and a humor writer whose stories have been included in the columns Aiming low, Funny, not slutty, Milwaukee moms and others. Alexandra was named blog her voice of the year for humor, and she's also a cast member of Madison's local listen to your mother show, which is a national series of readings by local writers in celebration of Mother's Day. Alexandra still has the Little Bear DVD too, something she says she'll never not have. You can see a picture of that on our website, themoth.org as well as other pictures from our storytellers in this week's episode. So that's going to do it for us. This time. We hope you have a story worthy week and three cheers for all the moms out there. We're thinking of you, we love you and we're sending you lots of thanks.
- [20:18]
Apple Representative
Sarah Austin Janess is the Executive Producer of the Moth and is also a.
- [20:22]
Sarah Austin Janess
Host of the Moth Radio Hour podcast production by Timothy Lou Lee. The Moth Podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.