A Second-Generation Polio Story

My lunch money became our way home.

I don’t know if there’s a name for the children of polio survivors, but second-generation polio survivor is the closest one I have.

My mother survived polio. Its effects shaped the rest of her life, and her children’s.

She had a weak right leg and a damaged left arm, and still gave birth to six children. I try to imagine what it must have been like to be nine months pregnant in a North Carolina summer, with no air conditioning, wearing a heavy metal-and-leather leg brace. I imagine the heat.

The weight. The exhaustion.

I am only eighteen months younger than my closest brother. Between being pregnant with him and pregnant with me, my mother spent time in a full-body cast. Those were common in the 1960s, plaster casts that encased the entire body, with only a small opening cut out for a bedpan. Again, in North Carolina. Again, with no air conditioning.

I grew up watching my mother fall.

I have many memories of falls, but one from early childhood stays with me.

I was about eight years old. We were at the University of North Carolina School of Dentistry for my appointment. The floors were slick. My mother slipped.

I remember her lying on the ground. People rushed toward her. Voices rose. I remember her crying—not from pain, but from frustration, asking them not to make a scene, begging them not to take her to the emergency room.

“Just help me up,” she said.

I stood with my back pressed against the wall, trying to stay out of the way while keeping my eyes on her.

Despite her protests, they put her on a stretcher and took her to the ER. Nothing was broken. Eventually, they sent us home.

But when we made it back to the parking lot, the attendant was gone. The lot had closed for the day. To get out, you had to feed change into the exit gate machine.

My mother had no change. The booths were closed.

This was long before debit cards or credit card readers. There was no button to press for help.

She had spent the day picking me up from school, driving me to the dentist, falling, being examined, being watched, and being carried. Now she stood in the parking lot crying again—nothing broken, but defeated all the same.

Then I remembered.

I had my school notebook with a little zippered plastic pencil pouch. Inside were my lunch-money quarters.

We fed the coins into the machine.

The gate lifted.

She was so relieved.

I was so proud.

That was my childhood.