Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Does your morning toast taste more like cardboard than bread? Then you haven't tried America's number one organic bread, Dave's Killer Bread. Killer taste, killer texture, killer nutrition. Now try our new Rock and Rolls, a dinner roll done the Dave's way. Soft and slightly sweet and packed with the seeds and grains you love. Find them in the bread aisle. Visit daveskillerbread.com to learn more and look for Dave's Killer Bread in the bread aisle of your local grocery store. Dave's Killer Bread. Bread Amplified.
Support comes from Zuckerman Spader. Through nearly five decades of taking on high-stakes legal matters, Zuckerman Spader is recognized nationally as a premier litigation and investigations firm. Their lawyers routinely represent individuals, organizations, and law firms in business disputes, government, and internal investigations, and at trial, when the lawyer you choose matters most. Online at Zuckerman.com.
This autumn, fall for Moth Stories as we travel across the globe for our mainstages. We're excited to announce our fall lineup of storytelling shows. From New York City to Iowa City, London, Nairobi, and so many more, The Moth will be performing in a city near you, featuring a curation of true stories. The Moth mainstage shows feature five tellers who share beautiful, unbelievable, hilarious, and often powerful true stories on a common theme. Each one told reveals something new about our shared connection.
To buy your tickets or find out more about our calendar, visit themoth.org slash mainstage. We hope to see you soon. From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Katherine Burns, and this hour is all about mothers.
We'll hear about a blundering Pittsburgh mom who keeps embarrassing her kids, a healthcare worker in Zambia who suddenly needs help herself, a bed-bound patient trying to save her 10-year-old boy's life, a teenage mom standing up for her son, and our first story told by Chrissy Graham. Here's Chrissy, recorded live at the Seattle Story Slum. Like most of you, I'm guessing I was a total dork as a kid. I mean, like...
For Halloween, I was Mozart. It was that bad. I'm not kidding. And, you know, to boot, I had terrible, terrible, terrible vision. I had these thick Coke bottle glasses. It was just painful. I was just steeped in dorkdom. And I wanted so badly to get out. I just, I wanted to be cool more than anything. And my mom, my mom saw this?
And, bless her heart, in like the most amazing act of loving kindness, she got me contact lenses. And not soft lenses, hard, gas permeable lenses. And if you guys have ever had this, you know what it's like. It's like, you know, the texture of an M&M shell. And it's about that resilient. And so, you know, this was an amazing, amazing act of faith to give these lenses to an 11-year-old kid, okay? Yeah.
And so very wisely, she sat me down and she said, Chrissy, these lenses cost $50 each. And if you break one or if you lose one, you're going to have to pay to have it replaced. And I was like, I don't know how much that is, but I know it's a lot. It's a lot of money. Because I didn't really get money at 11. So anyhow, these lenses sold.
I love them because they freed me up to not be a total, total dork. And it was great. Six months after this conversation, I was taking the bus home. And it was the city bus, not the school bus, mind you, because, you know, now it was cool because I had my contacts. And I had a perm and I had the over-the-shoulder spree bag. You remember? Yeah.
So I get off the bus and the bus drives away and as it does it spews all this grime into the air and it gets in my eye and if any of you have ever experienced having stuff in your eye with a hard contact lens, I mean it is excruciating. You can't think, you can't walk, you can't talk, you can't do anything except for pop that lens out of your eye which is exactly what I did and in that moment
Just gust of wind. And my beloved contact lens, it was gone. It was just gone. And that was a long, long walk home because not only was I missing my lens, but I thought, how am I going to tell my mom? She is going to be devastated.
devastated that I lost this lens and I let her down only six months after she trusted me and I thought okay I don't know how to do this so I'm gonna wait until dinner and I'm gonna think about how I'm gonna break the news to her. So dinner time came and I still didn't know I didn't know how to do this so I thought well I'll sleep on it and I'll come up with a good idea in the morning and I woke up nothing. I thought okay I can only see out of one eye
I can probably make it through the day. And I'll think about what I'm gonna say by the time I come home. Still nothing. This went on for four years.
And the only thing that made me say something was that I was about to turn 16 and get my driver's license, and I needed to see. So I couldn't tell my mom the truth at this point. So, you know, I made up some story that I was, like, at, you know, Christian river raft camp or something, and, you know, got washed out, and, you know, like, God reached up with his watery hand and plucked it out of my eye, and it was meant to be. And her response was...
"Oh sweetie, I'm so sorry. We'll get you a new one." And I was like, "Seriously, had I known this four years earlier?" Anyhow. And when I finally, finally got up the courage to tell her what really had happened, I was 33. And her response was just bewilderment that I could ever doubt her unconditional love for me. Thank you.
That was Chrissy Graham. Chrissy is a clinical psychologist. She says in her spare time, she enjoys singing in choirs, climbing mountains, and drinking cocktails. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine and surgery, she no longer wears contacts. We asked Chrissy for an update. She wrote, "My mom lives in Boulder, Colorado and is the best grandmother in the universe to my crazy kids. She's run something like seven marathons after turning 50, so she's certifiably amazing and insane."
Next, we're going to hear another story from one of our Story Slam competitions. Here's Katherine Palmer, live from Pittsburgh. I literally blundered my way through my childhood. Some of these blunders were related to being in the wrong place or doing things at the wrong time, and many of them were related to just misinterpreting situations that were right in front of me. I was the kid the first day of middle school who actually got off the bus at the wrong school. And the...
The problem with that is everybody remembers that and then you're the kid that got off at the wrong school. But I had one thing going for me growing up. My family moved every two years. So no matter how miserable I was, it was generally only a matter of months until we moved and I had a clean slate. So moving often is a gift to a blundering child. But as I grew up, my blunders were less frequent but more epic. So in college...
I did a summer internship up at Tufts University with about 20 other college kids. And about a week into it, we found out one of the kids had a birthday the next day. And I took over. I planned the party. I got a cake. Because I was going to establish myself as the party planner and not the blunderer. And everything went really well the next day until the birthday boy showed up. And we had wanted to surprise him. And I think it's safe to say we did. Because when he saw the cake, he went running from the room. And when I blunder, I'm committed. So I actually ran after him with cake in hand.
And he locked himself in a dorm room not to come out until the next morning, at which point we found out he was a Jehovah Witness. Now, if that connection doesn't work for you, it turns out that Jehovah Witnesses don't celebrate their own birthdays. They only celebrate the birth of Jesus. And celebrating your own birthday is a sacrilege. So this was my first blasphemous blunder.
Once I had kids, I realized more than anything, I really just didn't want them to be blunderers. I didn't know if this could be genetic, but I felt it could be contained. And so I considered myself the guardian for my kids going to school of preventing blunders by thinking about my blunders, making my kids practice so they wouldn't have the same problems.
Keeping tabs on what they were asked to do. One of my theories of childhood blunderings, and I have several, is that kids are asked to do things they're socially not ready to do. So it's like the smart third grader that gets put in fifth grade math. It seems like a great academic decision. Except for the kid goes the wrong room, sits the wrong seat, because they're not socially ready to navigate that fifth grade world.
This went well for me until my older boy Eric was in second grade, and unbeknownst to me, someone found out he played violin. And in grade school, you're not meant to be in the orchestra until third grade, but they found out he could play and invited him, and this is just exactly what I had wanted to avoid, but it was too late because he was thrilled to have been included. So as the holiday concert came up,
I had the sinking feeling. I knew there was going to be a monumental blunder and when we got there I was watchful, ready to jump in to head off something that's going to hurt my kid. The concert started without incident though. I started to relax and we got to the last song and the director said, "All the whole group will play Silent Night, then there'll be a soloist, and then the whole group will play Silent Night again."
And the whole group played Silent Night and then my worst fear came true. All the kids sat down except for Eric. And this is exactly what happens to young kids. They don't listen, they don't know what they're meant to be, and for all I knew, he didn't know what soloist meant. But I realized it wasn't too late. I could fix this. He did not have to be the kid that stood up during someone else's solo for the rest of his life. So...
I stared at him and I willed him to sit down and I just gently moved my hand. But it turns out I'm not a Jedi Knight and it didn't work. So I said, "Sit down." Moving my hands a little bit more, nothing.
So I realized maybe he couldn't see me because I was sitting, so I stood kind of halfway up, kind of like crouching, and I said, "Sit down." And the woman behind me tapped me, and as I turned around, if looks could kill, she would be dead. But luckily they can't, and she leaned forward and said, "Your son is the soloist." At which point I lowered myself and made kind of a sweeping gesture that he should continue.
So this is a two-tiered blunder. This is the obvious blunder that I ruined a concert, but it's the parental blunder of being the mom that's so uninvolved that she didn't realize her kid was the soloist.
So two weeks later, I'm taking my other kid to a swim meet and I'm going to put an end to this impression that I'm uninvolved and I'm going to cheer louder and longer than any other person in the stands. So my kid starts his race and I am clapping and I am screaming and I am saying his name loudly over and over, length after length. And I am the most involved parent and I feel great right until the kid I'm cheering for sits down next to me in the stands fully dressed. But I'm committed and I keep cheering.
And my son Grant looks up at him and he says, "Why are you still cheering?" And bitterly I said, "It's important to cheer for all the children. Everybody's trying hard." And he nodded, and then he said, "Why are you still shouting my name?" And then through gritted teeth I said, "How do you know it's not that child's name? Do you really think you're the only kid here named Grant?" To which he said, "Yes," and I had to give him that. It's really a very uncommon name in the States.
After these two events, I realized I had accomplished my goal. My kids weren't going to be known as blunders because I was doing it for them. So some people do their kids' homework. I blunder for my kids. And to this day, for my family, I embarrass them at several school events every year.
Catherine Palmer is an audiologist and university professor. I had never actually heard of an audiologist before I met Catherine. So for those of you who, like me, have no clue what that means, here's the definition. Audiology is the science of disorders related to hearing and balance. Though, this being public radio, maybe most of you knew that already. Anyway...
Coming up, a new mother in Zambia fears that she may have passed on a deadly virus to her baby girl when The Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX. You're listening to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns. Our next story is from Constance Mudenda, who everyone calls Connie. Connie was a part of a workshop we did in Zambia in southern Africa.
Our partner there was REDD, which was founded in 2006 by activist Bobby Shriver and the musician Bono to fight AIDS. The women in the workshop came from all over Zambia, and each of them had been affected by HIV and AIDS.
Kate Tellers from The Moth led the workshop. We worked with them for several days to help craft their stories, and on the final day, we did a showcase of stories in a club in downtown Lusaka, Zambia. What were some of the challenges of doing a storytelling workshop so far away in a very different world?
Well, there was the challenge that these were people that were unfamiliar with the moth. And not only that, that come from a different culture of storytelling. And they were also telling the story of the thing that had excluded them and made them the most stigmatized in their entire life. So that was a challenge in the beginning because they needed to understand why they were doing this. But what was amazing to me was that
in the first day as we went around the table and people started to share their stories and that thing that was the thing that isolated them the most in the world suddenly became the currency in the room. So talk to me about Connie. So Connie was one of our storytellers. Connie was, I would say, like the feistiest woman in the room. She was kind of the camp counselor of all of the other women. So here's Connie Mudenda live at the Moth in Lusaka, Zambia.
Working as a peer educator and counseling people that are HIV positive was actually very easy for me because apart from the training that I underwent, I'm a person that is living with HIV, and I didn't have any problems when it came to share my experience with them. But when I encountered women that were expecting HIV,
women that were pregnant, women that were waiting to get their results for their children to find out if they're HIV positive or not. It was something that I, well, took very lightly because I depended mostly on statistics. I would just simply say, look,
Last month, maybe we tested 100 women, and then maybe from the 100 women, 95 of those women had children that are negative. And that was fine because it was a statistic. It didn't really touch me so much. I had no experience with that. And there were women that would come.
and would lament because they could not get their results on time. And I would tell them that, look, if the system says you have to wait, then you need to wait. There's nothing that I can do. If they say you need to have your child retested, you need to have your child retested. There's nothing that I can do until I had that experience. I took my daughter to be tested when she was six weeks old. And they pricked her in the heel of the foot.
and I was told that I would get the results after two weeks. When I went back to the clinic after two weeks, the results were not yet ready, and then I was given another two weeks. So in total, that was a month of waiting anxiously, not knowing whether my child was negative or positive. I was very sure that somebody was keeping those results from me because my child was positive, and it really scared the hell out of me. So when I went back when it was a month,
And they told me that the results were not yet ready and I was supposed to take my child back so that they can prick her again. I just said, no, you're not going to prick my child. But those are not the exact words that I used. There are words that I used that I cannot actually repeat here. But I just told them, you're not going to prick my child. You'll get the results for me today. And they couldn't find the results in the clinic. But I was very lucky because I had gone to a clinic where...
Even the central lab was located. So I volunteered. I said, I'm going to go to the lab and find the results myself, which I did. And I went to the lab and said, I'm not going to leave this place until you give me my daughter's results. Fortunately, they were able to locate the results. So you know what happens when you just deliver here in Zambia? You are given three months maternity leave. You're supposed to be at home. So I got those results.
And the normal procedure was after I get them from the lab, I had to take them to the clinic so that they are recorded in the statistics book. But somehow, somehow, how I don't know, I bypassed the clinic. And instead of being home, I found myself at the office. I was not supposed to be working, but I found myself there. So there was this, you can try to imagine this crazy woman walking
running into a building with a piece of paper in her hand, weeping. I was crying. And then I just barged into our medical director's office. And then when she saw me with a piece of paper in my hand, she didn't ask. She also started crying. So these two women are crying.
We're not saying anything. We're just crying, weeping. And then after some time, she started telling me that, oh, everything is okay. There's medication. Your child is going to be okay. In the process, she takes the paper, looks at it, and suddenly she realized that the result was negative. So from that ordeal...
I realize that when I'm dealing with a woman, especially one that is waiting for the results of a child, I need to be more empathetic because I walked that walk and I know how it feels like. Thank you. That was Connie Mudenda. Connie's an AIDS activist living in Lusaka, Zambia.
Before having her daughter Lubona, who she talks about in her story, Connie had three other babies. Because Connie didn't know she was HIV positive, they were all born with a virus and died as children. But in 2004, Connie was diagnosed and able to go on antiretroviral therapy treatment. Eight years later, her daughter Lubona was born HIV-free.
Today, Lubona is healthy, happy, and getting on well with her studies at school. It's worth saying that the life-saving medication which allows Lubona to thrive costs just 30 cents a day. Here again is Kate Tellers, our moth workshop leader, who worked with Connie.
All of these women had lived with the stigma of having HIV and AIDS, and it was something, you know, they almost died rather than tell people and get the medication. But we started Soundcheck, and at Soundcheck I always say, don't tell your story, just tell me what you had for breakfast. And Connie was the first person to Soundcheck, and she just walks into the mic and she says, my name is Connie and I have HIV! And that was her Soundcheck.
But from going from the beginning of the week to everyone being quiet and feeling nervous to having that be the thing she wants to yell into the mic, I felt was a really great metaphor for what happened to these women during the process. To see photos of Connie and the other Zambian women, go to themoth.org. While there, you can share any of the stories you've heard. We're also on Facebook and Twitter at The Moth.
Do you have a story about your mom or about being a mom? We'd love to hear it. Call our pitch line, which allows anyone to leave a two-minute version of a story you'd like to tell. The number to call is 877-799-MOTH. Or you can pitch us a story right at our website, themoth.org. Our next story comes from Matthew Dix. He told this at our Boston Story Slam competition. Here's Matt. The bee stings me on my thigh as I'm getting onto my bike.
It hurts like hell, but I don't really think anything of it. I'm 10 years old and I spend half my summers without shoes or shirts anyway, so I'm getting stung all the time. But I don't know that this is a bee that's never stung me before. It's a yellow jacket. I get on my bike and I start riding home. It's a mile uphill up Federal Street to my house. About halfway home, I notice that my hands are starting to swell. My fingers are pink and fat.
and a second later I notice my feet are swelling too. I can feel them pressing against my sneakers. I'm not worried, I'm sort of curious. It's 1981 and we're all living in like perpetual haze of secondhand smoke and we're eating peanut butter sandwiches on gluten-packed Wonder Bread produced in asbestos factories. So like there are no allergies in the world and I can't imagine that this would be something to do with my bee sting.
About a quarter mile from my house though, I'm having a hard time breathing and I realize it has nothing to do with the hill or the pedaling. I feel my throat getting tight and I know something's wrong and now I start to get afraid. I pull into the driveway and I drop my bike. I go into the house. I push the kitchen door open and I fall down into the house and with everything I have, I suck in a breath and I call for help and there's no answer.
I remember that there's no car in the driveway. I'm home alone. So I pick myself up and I go into the dining room and I get the phone. It's hanging on the wall. It's got a long curly cord. I get down on the ground and I call the first number I can think of. My mom picks up on the first ring. She's actually in the hospital. She's had back surgery and I've been calling her every night and I have the number burned in my brain.
I tell my mom, "I can't breathe. I don't know what's wrong." And as calm as you could be, she says, "Hang up the phone and call 911." But I can't stand up anymore to get the phone onto the hook. So my mom tries to hang up on her end to call 911 herself, but it's 1981, and back then if you couldn't get both phones hung up, you couldn't break the connection. And so she's clicking, and then I'm still there, and clicking, and I'm still there.
So she tells the roommate in the room to call 911 and I hear her give her address. And then she comes back to me and she says, "How are you doing?" And I can't breathe at this point. And my mom's calmness turns to anger. She says, "Try to breathe. You calm down and you try to breathe, damn it." She says, "Help is coming and you better breathe." She hears the paramedics arrive. They come into the kitchen and they find me unconscious on the ground.
She hears them say that I have no respiration and no pulse. And she listens to them start CPR on me and she's screaming in the phone for one of them to pick it up, but they don't see it and they can't hear her in the commotion. She hears them put me on a stretcher and take me out into the driveway still pounding on my chest and breathing down my mouth. She gets on the call button and she calls the nurse in the emergency room because I am coming to the same hospital that she is at.
She tells the nurse in the emergency room that I'm on my way and she has to know my condition when I arrive. I talk to her later and she says it's the longest 10 minutes of her entire life. When I open my eyes, I see a bright white light and there's a woman's face and for a minute I think it's my mom.
And then that woman shines a light into my eyes even brighter and I blink and when I open my eyes again, I can see that it's a nurse and I can see I'm in an emergency room and the woman is telling me, "I'm going to be okay." And all I want to do is see my mom. 26 years later, my mom and I are back at the same hospital. My mom is in the ICU unit now. She has muscular dystrophy and she has double pneumonia. She's been in a coma for three days
and the nurses tell me that she's just holding on and she's not going to wake up. My wife and I have been visiting every night, and this night I sit on the edge of her bed and I watch Little House on the Prairie with her, which is a show we used to watch when I was a little boy. And I talk to her and I tell her funny things. And as we're getting ready to leave, I ask my wife if she'll give me a minute with my mom. And so she leaves, and when she does, I lean close to my mom's ear.
I don't know if she can hear me, but I'm hoping like that day that I was on that phone and she could hear me from so far away, I'm hoping that my words can reach her. And I tell my mom, "It's okay. You don't have to try anymore." I tell her that she was a good mom and she had done a great job with everyone and that if she wanted to go and she didn't want to try anymore, that it would be okay with me.
and it would be okay with everyone else. And then I leave, and the next morning at work I get a call that she's passed peacefully in the morning. When I miss my mom, which I do a lot, I think about that day when I was on that floor in the dining room on that phone, and how we were so far apart, but she was right there with me the whole time, keeping me alive. And I like to think that maybe we still have that connection,
Even though we wanted to disconnect that day, we couldn't, and I'm hoping that that's still true now. That somehow that white phone still reaches to my mom, and that when I want to talk to her, she can still hear me like she could that day. Thank you. Matthew Dix is a school teacher and the author of many novels, including Memories of an Imaginary Friend and The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs.
When I told Matt that we were airing this story, he wrote, "I wish my mom could hear it. She died before ever hearing me tell a story or seeing one of my books. Or even one of my kids. Makes you realize how quickly life can change in less than 10 years. Damn." Coming up, a young teenager living in foster care is actually happy to find herself pregnant.
when the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the public radio exchange, PRX.org. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns. In this hour, we're telling stories about moms, and our last story is told by Melissa Rodriguez. We met Melissa through our friends at the public radio show and podcast, Radio Diaries.
I recently sat down with Joe Richman, founder of Radio Diaries, to discuss a special project they did with teenagers. Teenage Diaries started way back in 1996, 20 years ago. And it just started as, you know, the idea was just to give tape recorders to teenagers around the country and basically turn them into reporters, you know, reporting on their own lives. And Melissa was one of that first crop of teenagers way back then. So what makes a good diarist?
I mean, you know, diarists are good in so many ways. There are some that are good at like thinking like a radio producer and recording all the sounds. And there are some that are good at, you know, late night confessional on the bed and really talking about themselves in a really lovely, reflective, poetic way. But, you know, one of the things that makes a good diarist is that you just have to be willing to turn the tape recorder on and record stuff and record important scenes and
And Melissa certainly did that. I mean, like what makes a good diarist is if you're willing to bring the tape recorder in when you're delivering a baby. Yeah. For instance, let's listen to that. Today is October the 9th and I have a brand new baby boy, seven pounds. His name is Isaiah Seto.
And he was born at 1.30, right? 1.30, right? 1.17. And we would have recorded the birth, but it happened so fast. About half an hour. You know, so I'm sorry you couldn't hear all the pain, but it was easy. Melissa Rodriguez grew up in foster care, and one moment in her radio diary jumps out at me. It's when Melissa is trying to reach out to her birth mother and let her know that Isaiah has been born.
As far as my own mother, you know, I'm debating on if I should call to let her know that her grandson is here. I don't know. I don't think she really will care. She's just that kind of person. But I'm going to try to call her. So let's see if I can find her number here. I haven't talked to her in a while, so let's see.
The number you have dialed has been changed to a non-published number. Once again, the number you have dialed... Well, I guess she won't find out that she has a grandson. 18-plus years later, Melissa told a story for us at a night we did in collaboration with Radio Diaries called Don't Look Back, Stories from the Teenage Years. Here's Melissa Rodriguez live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Hello. Hello.
When I was 17, my foster sister told me about a dream she had. She had a dream about fish. She told me when you dream about fish, it means someone's going to have a baby. So I laughed. Okay, so what does that mean? You're going to have a baby? She says, no. It's someone not in my dream. That person is you. So she said, go ahead, take a pregnancy test and find out. So I said, okay. I'll play along. So I go take a pregnancy test.
When I took the pregnancy test, I see there was a plus sign on the pregnancy test. So I figure, okay, the test looks like it's done. So I asked her to come over and read the test for me. And she said, yep, that plus sign means you're pregnant. I didn't believe her. So I went back to the store. I bought a few more pregnancy tests. And I took all eight of them. And every single one of them was a plus sign. So here I am at 17, pregnant.
After being in foster homes and residentials and being bounced around since the age of six, not having much of a mother or father, I always wanted a family. At this time, I was emancipated. That basically means I was an adult on my own in my own apartment. Plans to go to college. I decided I can go to community college. I could still go to school and have my baby. I really wanted this baby. No one wanted me to have this baby but me.
So I made up my mind. I was gonna do everything I can to raise this baby the way I thought a baby should be raised. With love, care, and understanding. So I called his father up and I told him, "Listen, I am pregnant and I'm having this baby with or without you. Either way, I'm still gonna have this baby." I was kind of hoping in the back of my mind he would say, "Hey, go right ahead." I wanted this baby just for me. A little selfish, but that's the way I felt at 17.
So here I am pregnant, nine months later. Had a baby boy named Isaiah. When he was born, I thought it was a beautiful thing. I never knew what unconditional love was. Excuse me. Until I had it. I felt so much love. I had enough love for it to be his father and mother. I wanted to care for this baby. This was me with my rules. The way I saw the way a child should be taken care of. I was very determined.
to give him everything he needed and wanted. I was very happy that day. You can ask anyone in the labor room. All my friends. So I took Isaiah home with me. Just me and him. Isaiah never seemed to be happy. He was always crying. And being 17, I figured, okay, so I'll feed him every time he cries. I'll change his diaper every time he cries. Or I'll bathe him and buy him some of those goodnight shampoos. Make him feel better at night.
I'll lay him in the bed with me at night. I'll walk him around the house all night. Nothing made Isaiah happy. So at our six-month checkup, I take Isaiah to his doctors. And I said, doctor, I think something's wrong. My baby is not doing things like other babies do. And she said, that's normal. It's only six months. He'll grow out of that. So I said, well, she's a doctor, so I should believe her.
Two months later, Isaiah wakes me up out of my sleep. And when I say wake me up, I was so scared. I heard his cry so loud. I thought somebody was coming in my window or his window because he had his own room at the time. So I run to his room half asleep and I turn on the light and I see Isaiah sitting up in his bed, his pampers, bought him the huggies because they were the best, white t-shirt, no socks because he hated socks.
He's sitting up and he's blue in the face and he's yelling and he's screaming and I'm looking around in the room like, what's going on in here? I don't see anyone in here. But his face was almost gray. I wasn't sure what was going on, but my mother instance kicked in real fast and told me, wrap that baby up and get him in the emergency right away, like now. So I wrapped him up in his baby blanket and I ran into my hoopty as fast as I could and I put him in the back seat and strapped him in.
I think the emergency room was about 15 minutes away from my house. I got there about 5. Red lights meant nothing, stop signs meant nothing. I just needed to get my baby there. It was just this urgency to hurry up, hurry up, get there fast. So I get to the emergency room and doctors and the nurses run outside and they see something's wrong also. I didn't even have to tell them anything. They grab Isaiah and his blanket and they rush him upstairs to the intensive care and
They tried to calm him down, but they could not calm him down. I didn't understand why. They didn't understand why. So he put him in a straitjacket. Eight-month-old baby in a straitjacket. The image was horrible. And they're pushing me away. They don't want me to see what's going on. And I'm wondering why. I'm his mother. I'm the only one here. So they take Isaiah and they roll him out in the bed, take him out of the intensive care. And the nurse pushed me to the side and said, you need to stand here for one minute. I'll be right back.
"Where are you taking my baby?" I needed to be with my baby. So she comes right back and I did a few seconds later with this form. She says, "Sign. Sign this form. You need to sign this form right now." So I try to glance at this form to find out what is this form that I'm signing. And as I noticed I was signing a form to release the fact that if my baby didn't make it, I couldn't blame the hospital for it. I'm a little confused at this point. Like, what are you saying?
Are you saying I'm signing my child's life away? And she said, "You better hurry up. There's not much time. You need to sign this if you want to save your baby." So of course any mother is going to sign. I'd rather give my child a little bit of a chance than no chance. She puts me in a room where I had to wait. That hour and a half was the longest half an hour I ever had. But then she comes out with a grin in her mouth. She's smiling, smiling. She couldn't be smiling if something's bad.
So she approached me and she said, "You know, you got a pretty strong baby there." He made it with no problems. They told me that his heart had stopped. And if I did not bring him to that hospital that day, I would have lost him. He has a pacemaker that can help him live now. And he's strong. And they wheel him out and bring him right back to the same spot in intensive care. Sleeping peacefully. Almost like he needed that. That sleep really bad. And I watched him.
Nurse tells me she's gonna send me to a specialist to find out what is wrong with Isaiah so that we can know and give him the medicine he needs and take care of the problem. So she takes me to a specialist, the best. Dr. M, we're gonna call her. So Dr. M takes tests of Isaiah, blood tests, skin tests, MRI tests, every test you can imagine for months. For a while, she couldn't figure out what was wrong with him either. Finally,
She had it diagnosed for him. And she said, "Well, Melissa, it looks like Isaiah has cerebellar ataxia." "What is that?" I had to look it up to find out what that was. But she tried to explain to me, "Well, what happens is your brain and your body communicate at all times, even when you're sleeping." And unfortunately, Isaiah does not have that communication. His brain and his body just don't talk to each other. And there's about nine cases in the world
In every case, the child has passed at the age or by the age of six. So basically, she told me, prepare yourself for a funeral. God just gave me a child just to lose it. I think so. Oh, I was furious. I was mad. I've never lost my cool the way I did. But I said, fuck that, Mrs. M. Taking my baby to another doctor. I don't know if you're the best doctor there is, but I don't think so.
I don't think this is possible. I'm going to someone else. We're going to do something else. This is not working. So I take him to other doctors and I do my own little work. I went online, found out what was going on with the cerebellar antaxia, which I had no idea what it was. But there's no medicine. There's no cure. There's no research. There's nothing. I did my own research. I figured out that we're going to be determined to fight this disease, this problem. See, Isaiah had a
problem with balance. He couldn't do the things simple kids can do like ride a bike. His right foot and left foot just wouldn't pedal. So every year I bought him a bike and his fourth Christmas I bought him a red bike with training wheels and I said I'm gonna train him to ride this bike. They said he couldn't do it we're gonna train him to do it. So I put Isaiah on the bike and he had a hard time riding that bike. I almost wanted to get on the bike myself but ride it for him it was so bad.
His right foot would come up and his left foot would go down and just sliding right off those pedals. So I came up with an idea to buy him Velcro straps to put the sneakers in place so he can have that balance. So the day after Christmas, I told him, I said, go get that mail out the mailbox for me. He loved getting the mail. So he tried very hard. At first, it didn't look very good. But he kept trying and he kept trying and I didn't stop him.
I let him try, keep trying. Finally, I seen that right foot go up and the left foot go up, the right foot go up. And before you knew it, Isaiah was pedaling. He went and got that mail for me and he turned around, well, picked up the bike and turned around. And he smiled just so brightly, almost like he knew. Look, Ma, they said I couldn't do it, but I did it. I was so proud of him.
I was even more determined because it is possible. So at 11, I took him back to Dr. M. I sat there proudly on my little parent chair. Isaiah jumped right up on that little white sheet. And he sat there like, oh, hurry up, doctor. She checks his knees and she checks his back and tells him to walk. And she's looking at the chart and she's not sure what's going on. So she asked me, what have you been doing? It's called faith. Trying, not giving up.
And she says, well, come back in six months for your regular checkup. I was so proud that my son was going back for a regular checkup, not the next day or overnight stay or MRIs or nothing. Isaiah's 18. Now he still has some challenges, but those challenges, he knows how to deal with them now. He comes to me and asks me for help, and he tells me what's wrong. I love my Isaiah. He reminds me of me, how strong I am.
He looks just like me. He acts just like me. He knows I'm going to take good care of him because I'm his mother. That was Melissa Rodriguez. Melissa lives in Connecticut and works as a customer service representative at a call center and has two sons, Isaiah and Tyran. Here's Radio Diaries producer Joe Richman again.
What really struck me, you know, she was abandoned at the age of two and she spent, you know, her life in, I think it was seven group homes, five residential facilities and eight foster homes by the time she was 17. And she was emancipated at the age of 17. She was living on her own legally.
And so I was just interested in how does someone like that, you know, what makes someone like that survive when someone else doesn't? You know, what are the qualities of a survivor? And, you know, all these years since, it's like Melissa is a survivor. It is like her stories in some way are like a portrait of a survivor. We're thrilled to report that Melissa and Isaiah continue to thrive. You can hear Melissa's teen and adult diaries, along with other stories from the series, on the Radio Diaries podcast, which we highly recommend.
That's it for this special Mother's Edition of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time.
Your host this hour was The Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns. The stories in the show were directed by Maggie Sino and Kate Tellers. The rest of The Moth's directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Janess, Jennifer Hickson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Muj Zaydi and Michelle Jalowski. Special thanks to our friends at Radio Diaries, Joe Richman and Sarah Kramer, and from Red, Deborah Dugan, Sheila Roche, Hugh Davies, and Holly Aubrey.
Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Recording services for The Moth by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruwest. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Julian Lodge, Sandy Nelson, and Regina Carter. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.
