When Jack was 6 and Leta 4, Jack clearly loved his sister, but he was still struggling with the fact that she was so sick, so often and required so much medical care.  He hated the long periods of time that I was away with Leta at the hospital, he hated the sound of the oxygen machine whirring all night.  He said it kept him from sleeping and was a scary sound outside his door.  And he hated watching us have to wrestle Leta to the ground nightly in an attempt to attach her oxygen to her nose.  Leta refused to keep her nasal canula on, but without it she would turn blue, so our only alternative, short of  having her on a tracheal ventilator, was to strap her arms down with “No-No’s,” a euphemism as far as she was concerned, for straight jacket.  The “No-No’s” prevented Leta from bending her arms and therefore, she was unable to pull out the oxygen tubes from her nose.   We hated putting Leta through this misery, but the end justified the means.  Without “No-No’s” Leta would not get enough oxygen to breathe.

One evening, while I was holding Leta down on the floor and unwinding the surgical tape to wrap her in the “NO-NO’s”,  Jack walked by and insensitively asked: “Why does she have to scream so much every time you put that on her?” ” Why is she such a cry baby about it? It’s just oxygen.”  And for some reason, in a moment of sleep deprivation, grief and bad parenting, I did the unthinkable.

I grabbed my son, held him down and strapped both the “No-No’s” on his arms and placed the nasual canula in his nose, turning up the O2 strong enough to let him feel the rush of air through his nostrils.  He flailed, he wailed, just like Leta.  As I write this, I am horrified that in  some strange quest to teach him empathy and compassion, I  put Jack through this.  We never talked about it again.  Occasionally, I would wonder what his therapy bills might look like down the road, but I buried the memory in our collective past.

And then it came up again, last year;  Ten years later, as I sat with Jack at a college essay writing seminar at The University of Virginia, my alma mater.  The professor was emphasizing to the kids that college essays need to be about a defining moment in your life that exemplifies who you are as a person and the writer needs to convey his own voice through the story.  Jack seemed interested, put his head down and began writing.  I read over his shoulder:

“ The oxygen was pulsating through my nose,  my mom had strapped me down, I couldn’t believe what was happening to me, but I knew at that moment how much I  loved my baby sister Leta.”

Jack turned to me and asked, “Do you think this is what he has in mind?”

I was so choked up, all I could manage to say was that you should go ask the teacher……..

Jack’s memory of that moment was not anger but pride that he had been able to experience Leta’s struggle.   And it seemed that in his memory, at age 6, he had a cathartic realization about how important Leta was to him.   What a relief for me that I wasn’t going to be painted as “Mommy Dearest” in all his college essays.  But more importantly, what a relief that my “tough love” worked.  Jack is a deeply caring and empathetic young man because of Leta.  All of my kids are.

They are wonderful, resilient and fun loving, with an endless capacity for empathy for their sister and  for the world around them.  I  do not take any credit for that part of them.  They learned it all from Leta.