do voices come back?

My mother lost her voice this weekend in a major way. I had to talk to my therapist about the trauma of hearing my mother sound like she's 100 and on her death bed. I hope my mother lives to 100 (in a healthy, happy way of course) and she's able to speak on her death bed, but right now, that's more than 40 years away and I was quite disturbed to hear her sound like that.

When we were little, she lost her voice completely. Right before it was gone, she told us she was losing her voice and I was really, really upset. I thought that her voice would never come back. I also thought that it would be like losing your arm or something. I remember asking her if it hurt. I'm surprised I have never completely lost my voice like that. My brother carried strep throat at that time and I continually had it. My mother told me this weekend that she was very glad she no longer had small children--when she lost her voice when we were little, she just threw things at us to make us behave since she couldn't yell at us.

My mother lost her mother when she was my age. Actually, she was about a year younger--just a month shy of her 30th birthday. I have strong memories of my grandmother, even though she died when I was two. I remember that her voice was like my mother's, the smell of her perfume and cigarettes, and that I adored her. When I last saw her, she was boarding a plane in Boulder to fly back to Lebanon, MO. She was wearing a houndstooth-print suit and a black turtleneck (my mother never wore black in my life, so I remember the black standing out) her squash blossom necklace (that has a story of its own--she loved it so much that she wore it with her bathrobe) and I sobbed, afraid I'd never see her again. Two-year-olds do that, I suppose, but it was accurate that time. She'd actually been babysitting me when she had her second heart attack. My mother was in the hospital, having my brother. A month and a half later, she had a stroke (in the Springfield hospital) and the family decided to take her off life support. She was 56. I suppose congenital heart problems as well as a love of smoking were the culprits.

On several occasions, my mother and my aunt were crazy enough to pile my brother, me, and my cousins into one of the Volvo station wagons (they each had one) and drive us all to Missouri. We have some extremely entertaining pictures from our drives across Kansas (here are the kids looking bored to tears sitting in an old school house in Dodge City; here are the kids looking thrilled and the mothers looking murderous at McDonald's). I always thought it was weird when we went to Lebanon, because every time my mother and aunt saw our cousin Martha, they'd all start crying. They said it was because they reminded each other of my grandmother. People would also just stare and me and my cousin Meg to see if we looked like our grandmother.

Interestingly enough, my grandmother was always pretty ticked off that she never had any offspring with brown eyes. Mine turned brown just after she died. All babies have blue eyes, and they usually change within a year, I believe, but I was two and a half.

I've inherited my grandmother's and my mother's dislike of beer.

I remember my mother crying in her room a lot over her mother's death, even when I was eight or nine. By that age, my mother had her own brush with death--she developed bacterial pneumonia. I remember going to visit her in the hospital, although rarely (in those days...back in the old days...there were major restrictions on children visiting hospitals). I also remember the rare treat of getting to go to McDonald's a lot--I don't think my father felt comfortable cooking. I had no idea how close my mother was to dying until a few years ago. My aunt, who was a nurse in the Boulder Community ER, had seen my mother's X-rays and was positive her sister was going to die.

But my mother survived and is now a healthy Democrat-cum-Bush lover, who lives on a farm and is currently dealing with EIGHT dogs (they already have six dogs of their own and are taking care of my stepsister's), a bunch of birds, and my stepfather. I'm trying to get her to apply for the LEEP program so that maybe she can feel a little more purpose in her life (and secretly get out of her Republican funk).