Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do

Sometimes, you just have to do what you have to do – even if you don’t want to do it, as my parents quickly realized. By the sixth anniversary of their teenage marriage they had five children
From the vantage point of having had four children later in life, my maternal grandmother observed that my parents, “grew up with their children.” If so, they grew up quickly, but when a toddler began holding her breath when she did not get what she wanted, mom was stumped. She mentioned it to her parents. Her pragmatic father said, “Let her hold her breath, if she faints she will start breathing again.” The next time the breath-holder protested not getting her way, Mom let her child go on strike and quit breathing. Sissy’s little face reddened, she glared, unbreathing and defiant at her uncooperative mother – until her toddler body refused to continue the self-punitive behavior and switched to automatic. Breath holding temper tantrums quickly faded after that.
As Mom saw it breath holding was just a childhood phase. With five children Mom saw her five children pass through many phases. “I would finally realize that they were going through a phase and it would be all over,” she observed.
If only “it’s a phase” fit every childhood difficulty … but it didn’t, especially not the accident that happened the first day of summer vacation when my big brother joined Dad for a run in the work truck. The door failed to latch securely. As they veered around a corner, the door flew open and the fourth-grade graduate fell out ad the truck ran over his leg.
The surgeon worked long and hard to successfully save the leg. Weeks of additional treatment and hospitalization followed. When he insisted that he could not swallow pills, the nurses mashed pills into jelly or other foods. One nurse, however, refused to accommodate him. She looked him straight in the face and told him he would take the pill and he would not say, “I can’t do that.” Under her stern, unmoving glare, he discovered he could do what he had to do. He swallowed the “horse” pill.
Through the long summer of healing and subsequent operations, my mother juggled hospital visits, baby sitters and time at home with the rest of us. We all rejoiced when the hospital released my brother with instructions for changing the dressing on his leg.
The first time the dressing had to be changed, my aunt, a registered nurse, showed my mother what to do. My mother watched and declared she simply could not change those bandages. It was too much for her.
“Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do,” auntie insisted and handed her the gauze.
Years later my sister told of watching my mother standing outside the door to my brother’s room with bandages and medications in hand as she sternly told herself, “Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do,” before entering the room to deal with his healing wounds. His leg healed and he played high school basketball.
In her final year, Mom exhibited the same attitude during her rounds of prescribed chemotherapy. Weeks and months after those initial procedures her voice still held an echo of the terror she had felt, but had refused to yield to as she sought treatment. She did what she had to do, sustaining her legacy to the end.