This whole thing started five hours after I was born.

Oakland, California. 1951.

By the end of that day, I had already been handed from one set of arms into another.

I was taken from the hospital in Oakland to another hospital in San Francisco, where my new mother received me. Everything was signed, sealed, and I was, in a way, twice delivered.

I have never met the woman who gave birth to me. I know nothing about her. I have never seen her face.

My adopted mother, Verda Smith, was a woman of grace and quiet strength.

One of my earliest memories is watching her do the hula to Lovely Hula Hands. She moved with a kind of softness that stayed with me. I would try to follow along, studying her movements, wanting to understand how something so simple could feel so beautiful.

I remember once riding on an elephant with her at a park somewhere in California. Even now, that memory feels almost dreamlike—her beside me, present, alive in the moment.

My mother lived most of her adult life in a wheelchair that didn’t move on its own.

At night, she slept in a bed that rocked back and forth like a seesaw to help her breathe. Later, she was able to come home, and we adjusted our lives around her presence.

We had help in the house, but I learned early how to assist my father in caring for her.

When she woke, a pad fitted with metal hooks would be fastened beneath her. A crank machine would lift her from the bed, swing her across the room, and lower her gently into her wheelchair.

We would straighten her clothes.
Fasten the breathing belt around her waist.
Snap the tray into place.

And there she was—ready for the day.

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She couldn’t move her left hand.

But her right… she would slowly bring it over and take hold of mine.

That’s when we would talk.

I would climb up beside her on that rocking bed, and for hours we would move back and forth while she made up stories. I would see them play out in my mind as she spoke. We laughed often. I could tell her anything.

She had polio in nearly every muscle of her body. From the time I was three years old, I watched her fight back against it.

The doctors had only given her a few years.

She lived fourteen.

There were machines—more than I can fully remember.

One held her arm in place so she could guide a spoon to her mouth under her own strength.

Another was a long, steel-gray cylinder—the iron lung.

It breathed for her in the final months of her life.

At seventeen, I saw my mother for the last time.

Not directly.

Through a mirror angled just right so I could see her face while sitting beside her.

She had told me she didn’t want me to remember her that way. She wanted me to remember her up… talking.

Even so, that reflection stayed with me.

It is the last image I have of her.

After she returned to the hospital, my father made the decision that I should live with his brother and his wife. Their home was just up the hill, but it was another world.

I stayed with them until my junior year of high school, when I returned to my father’s house.

My aunt taught me the basics of living—how to take care of myself, how to move through the world.

By the time I was five years old, I had already had three mothers.

One who gave birth to me and disappeared.

One who taught me courage… and left this world when I was seventeen.

And one who taught me how to live in it.

Years later, while I was out on the road driving a truck across the country, my aunt was diagnosed with cancer. She chose to end her life rather than become a burden to the family.

I learned more from all of my mothers than I understood at the time.

Verda knew I was never going to stay “normal” for very long. She let me be exactly who I was—tomboy and all. She smiled when I sang to her.

From her, I learned courage.

From her, I learned what it means to love without condition.

From where I sit now, I can see it more clearly.

I was never without a mother.

I was being shaped by each one of them.