The Most Amazing Mother

The Most Amazing Mother Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 4:22pm


The most amazing mother that I know lives just down the street. She's not my mother, as you might think. No, she's my daughter, Jenny Braswell Goolsby.

Faced with trials that most of us have only read about in Guideposts, she's amazingly strong, amazingly competent, and amazingly capable.

When I raised my children, Jenny and Kelly, they were unbelievably healthy. We had one round with a broken arm, and a few scraped knees, and a little bit of superventricular tachacardia. (Is that how that's spelled?) No allergies, no regular medicines, no shots other than regular immunizations. I went to the hospital, came home two days later with healthy babies. I brought them up and watched them grow...no problems.

It hasn't been the same for my daughter, Jenny and my son-in-law Kyle. Brayden was born 6 1/2 weeks premature. They took him early because he needed to come out. A problem in the womb would leave him with kidney issues for the rest of his life.

For his entire life, practically, he's had labs drawn every two weeks, sometimes more often. He eats sometimes through his mouth, but more often through a feeding tube. He throws up half of what he eats. He's on dialysis 9 hours a day, 6 days a week. He has had several rounds of peritonitis. He has already had more needles poked into him in his little life than most of us will ever have. He lives with constant nausea. 16 medicines a day, just to keep him healthy until the big day. And he smiles the biggest smiles I've ever seen, because he's a secure baby--secure in his parents' love.

Now, 13 months and 9 surgeries later, he faces the big one; the kidney transplant. My daughter is donating the kidney. That alone makes her my hero, and that's probably enough, but the way she has handled all of this has just been amazing.

I'm not saying that she's a better Mama than any of us would have been in her situation, but I am saying that with the cards that have been dealt her, I think Brayden is one lucky little guy to have her.

She's not only been a great mother this year, she's been a nurse (and a damn good one), a chemist (with lab results constantly running through her head), a wife, a daughter, and an educator. That's a lot of hats to wear, considering I used to think it bothersome that I couldn't clean up the house with the kids making messes as fast as I could clean them up, and wouldn't it have been nice just once to go to the grocery store alone. I would hope that someday Jenny will have such trivial thoughts, rather than, "Is his potassium/sodium/creatinine high (or low) because of this? Or is it that? How silly I was, with my healthy babies, compared to what she deals with 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the past 13 months.

So yes, Jenny is the most amazing mother that I know. Partial, well, yes; but to see how happy that little guy is in spite of all he's been through, that says a lot about his parents--both of them.