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36. A Good Wife
Linda has a stronger “others first” factor in her personality than I do. She is often the one who has provoked me to minister to others when my inclination has been to pray for them, but let them work things out themselves.
So late in January of 1973, when Auntie (my Aunt Helen who lived with us as I was growing up, and continued to live with Dad and Mom and Gloria after the rest of us had left home) went into the hospital, it was Linda who felt my mother would need help with Gloria.
“I feel like I should go down there and help,” said my beautiful young bride of a little more than four years. “Your Mom is going to need help while Auntie is in the hospital.”
So my bride with the caring heart and I took off for Lincoln Park the day after Auntie went into the hospital. It was a Monday. And she spent that week helping Mom until I picked her up on Saturday. It was a tough week for her.
My week went smoothly enough. Although I have missed Linda every time we have been separated throughout our married life, I can take care of myself. So while I had a normal week of business meetings with the church and with Gen-O-Shi-La, Linda helped Mom care for a nearly totally invalid woman in her forties. Mom was a hard task-master where care for Gloria was concerned. Linda was challenged to do things Mom’s way even if she saw a more efficient and less back-breaking way to do it.
She spent her twenty-fifth birthday caring for her husband’s family. She was exhausted when I drove her back to Flint on Saturday.
We spent the last Sunday of January at our church in Flint. But the next day, Linda insisted I take her back to Lincoln Park to help for another week. Auntie was improving; she may even have been home. But Linda felt the need to go back and help Mom for another week. So once again I spent a normal week of ministry at Emmanuel while she spent a demanding week caring for my family. I picked her up and brought her home on Friday. The next day we finally got to celebrate her birthday, nine days late. And then, when she finally was finished with her ordeal of caring for sick people, I came down with a bladder infection.
Bladder infections are not fun! Anyone who has ever had one will understand that statement. You spend a lot of time in the bathroom with much unpleasantness. Enough said about that.
Linda insisted I go to the doctor, which I did. After doing a urinalysis, he came into the examining room and said the sample was full of “debris.” I envisioned boulders and two by fours floating around. No wonder it hurt!
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He gave me some orange pills and instructed me to take them with food. We got home, and it was nearly supper time. As Linda prepared the supper, I took two of the pills. I promptly threw up. I did make it to the bathroom, but it was not pleasant. “Did the doctor say you were supposed to take these pills with food?” Linda asked. I thought a minute. “Yeah,” I said, “I think he did.” I took two more pills with supper, and everything stayed down like it was supposed to. Linda had some visits to doctors also. We began to wonder why after four years of marriage with no precautions to prevent it Linda had not become pregnant. A friend in the church who had just given birth after several years of marriage and treatments recommended her doctor. The diagnosis resulting from this examination was that Linda had polycystic ovary disease, which in the simplicity of my non-medical understanding, causes cysts to form on the ovaries. I was asked to contribute to the lab so that it could be determined if I was the cause of our childlessness. I was not. The recommendation? Fertility drugs. These would make conception more likely. But fertility drugs were fairly new in the early 70's, and there was a good possibility they might cause side effects, like multiple births. I mean really multiple births. In addition, they interfered with normal body functions and could have long term effects on the body. We chose not to go that route. Another possibility, the doctor said, was surgery. They could go in and strip the organ of the cysts. Ouch. No thank you, my bride said. So we decided not to pursue further medical involvement in the process of becoming parents. There were just too many risks, the expense was too great, and the success rate not all that promising. But my caring wife who was more ready than I was to take up someone else’s cause now needed someone to take up her cause. She was a good wife, and every inch of her also wanted to be given the opportunity to become a good mom. If medical science could not accomplish that, we knew Someone who could.
The photo shows Tom and Linda with their dog, Laddie, in the parsonage of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Flint, Michigan c. 1974.
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