Q&A: How have your family relationships changed?

They’ve gotten stronger, but me and my mother were best friends prior to this happening, and we’re still that now. It’s just we are day-to-day, and now I feel like I need to really take care of her, and she still feels like she needs to take care of me. So, our relationships have just gotten stronger, as well as that with my sons. They feel like, “okay, I now need to take care of mom.”

Boy, ever since paralysis, I have a much better relationship with pretty much everybody because I’ve learned things can be gone in a blink of an eye, and family’s always there.  No matter with all this stuff that I went through and they went through, they were right there dealing with it with me.  I’ve had friends turn and walk away, but not family.  I’ve learned how to love.  I’ve learned to be more patient with them, and with everybody else, which, with any relationship, patience really helps.  I have an awesome relationship with all them now.  If that’s the only thing I’ve gotten out of paralysis, it’s worth it.

We’ve always been a very close family. It’s just, he’s our only child. I was older, and my wife was too when he was born. So, we were always very close, and we stayed close. It put a strain a little bit with me being over here for three months and her being back in Memphis, and then her coming over and me going back to Memphis. You know, we kind of focused everything around him on trying to make sure he was healthy, he was improving and trying to figure out what we were going to do with this whole thing. You know, I mean if you’ve been through it, remodeling the house and all that. So, we got closer. When I went back to Memphis, I broke at that point. I had to go through counseling. Best thing I ever did in my life was going through there. And then when Talbot came home to stay, he went through counseling with the same woman. And then eventually my wife, I found out she didn’t at first tell me she went to counseling with the same woman too, and then we went as a group through counseling. And it was very beneficial. We were able to lay our thoughts out, what we thought about the whole situation. We got to be very honest with one another. We were still very close but we all had different opinions of how this was affecting each other, you know. So, it was good to find out. It was the greatest thing I’ve ever done. I was probably pretty close to suicidal. Shepherd’s Center realized that and gave me some counseling when I was here. But when I got back I was just so depressed I didn’t want to do anything. And I realized I needed some professional help. I’d never done it before but boy, it was terrific. You know, she read me like a book, you know. It was good.

I don’t think they have changed all that dramatically.  They did in the beginning, but then it’s kind of like the pendulum swings way to one side, and then way to the other.  And when the dust settles, and life starts to settle down, and things become more routine, it falls back into the middle.  I’m the oldest, and I was the go-to person.  If there was going to be an event, it was going to be at my house.  And for the most part, it still is that way.  So, I don’t think they’ve changed dramatically in the long term.

It’s been interesting.  I think the dynamic that’s particularly changed has been between the three boys.  So, between my eldest and my second, between the child whose disabled and the second, there’s two years, and between the second and the third, there’s fifteen months.  So, they’re very close.  They’ve always, fortunately, been very good friends, but there’s always the eldest, the middle and the youngest.  Well with the eldest being disabled, the middle child has kind of stepped up into the older-brother role in a very good way.  We really made a big effort to try and not always have everything be all about Nico.  I think that’s a big danger.  I don’t know how successful we were, but we tried.  I think it’s a very difficult thing to achieve, to not have whole world revolve around the other child.  And, that’s as important in my mind not just for the other two children, but also for the handicapped person themselves.  Because, the world doesn’t revolve around them, as much as might feel like it sometimes.  But, the long and short of it is that out there, the world does not revolve around him, and so we all need to figure out how to deal with that. 

The basics haven't changed at all, because we didn't come into this like having to get up to speed on how we loved each other, how we cared for each other. We were a loving family and we were always very close to each other. And we always say we love each other and like each other, so that's kind of cool. We can talk about politics, I love Radiohead, you know we share so many things with each other before this, so the basics stayed the same. What has changed is, now when they want to help me, I better let them. You know, I had to spoil them before and do everything, and I didn't realize, even though I had no intentions of saying this them, that I was saying that they weren't capable of doing it. Now, you know, now I would die rather than make them feel that way about them. I adore them, they're the most wonderful people in the world. So they want to be a part of this and I better let them in—all the way, all the way not just on my terms.

The relationship with my family, and my caregiver—my big sister—they haven’t changed. We’re just the two brats that we grew up together. She cares more, she still wants to be there, she calls me at five o’clock every day, and asks me “What do I need?”—if I need her to stop by and bring me some, you know, carry-out, some carry-in, some food, or if I need anything.  And my question and my answer every day is, “No, I don’t need anything Yvonne, thank you. Go away, get a life!” That’s what I tell her, and then she keeps calling me every day. With my mom, because my mom, my relationship with my mom is that she still wants to see me cured, and it doesn’t bother me, but it’s just “Come on Ma.” I mean, everybody around it—“I’m working, I’m doing stuff, let’s just get over the fact that it’s all wrong with me.” And then, you know, she’s a Latino mother, “Oh, my son, I saw you walk, I carried you in my arms, you have to be okay again, or normal.” And I’m, “Mom, I do all kinds of stuff. Don’t you see?” So, I’m still dealing with my mom a little bit. I have two, I have another sibling, another brother from my mother’s second marriage, and those guys are the coolest. They don’t care; they treat me like they treat me when we were growing up together. They know I kid around, I’m grouchy, and, but they’re always, as soon as I call them, or say something, they know how to react because they know, “Okay, now he’s asking for help, this is serious.” So, the dynamic of the family hasn’t changed a lot. They do have to make some modifications when we go to celebrate birthdays, or have birthday parties with the big old family I got here because, “Oh, Ramon’s coming. Can we go there?” Or, some folks, like the Quinceañera is a big party in my culture, so the Quinceañera is their day, and some of my cousins, they’re like, “Oh man, we’re looking for a hall that you can go to.” And I go, “It’s your party! You go ahead and do whatever the hell you want, and I’ll try to be there. You know, don’t make a party around me, It’s your party, you know, your wedding, your Quinceañera.” So, my family, the whole family, is still like, “Oh, what can we do for Ramon?” It’s, “Just carry me in.” I mean, and my cousins are big, so they can carry me.

We're, I would say, with my family, I mean with my mom, the love has always been there. You know, that's one of the things for me is, just waking up and seeing her, you know, that's the beauty of it. With my brothers, we've always been close, but never really talkative, you know, not really share all that, just close, and the one of the major things was my dad. Back then he used to drink, so we never really had a relationship, period. Now he doesn't drink and helps out a lot more around the house, now he helps out with me a lot more. So, you know, it's still not a perfect relationship, father-son, but it is a lot better than what it was.

So, for one let’s talk about my mother, her and I relationship. I mean I’ve always been pretty much of a mama’s boy, but after I got injured, with her being my primary caregiver our relationship has just evolved to something amazing. So, for her and I, we’re almost sort of like best friends to a certain extent. It’s like I still respect her as my mother, but we talk, and we chat and it’s great. And I know that anything that happens, if god forbid I’ve an invol or whatever the case maybe, I can call her up and with no regards, she is going to be right there on my side. So, her and I relationship is super strong. In addition I learned that because I need my family a little bit more with just little things, Just “can you button this for me?” Or “Can you grab this off the cabinet?” I have to value my relationships because I know that I need them, so I’m a little bit more patient and I’m a little bit more respectful. So, I think that my family relationships, or familial relationships, are just like super grown because I know that I need them a lot more now, so I appreciate them a lot more now.

The relationship with my mother grew because I understood where she’s been coming from for all of these years. The relationship with my father grew and got better because I was able to forgive him for his shortcomings in being a young-man father. The relationship with my brother grew because I was able to understand just who he is as his own person. So, I think that on an emotional level, while this is catastrophic and it changes everything, it also gave me a clean slate to start anew from, so that I could in the end, understand, value and appreciate the relationships that I have with the people who are closest to my life.

The relationships have changed only in the sense that sometimes our family forgets that he can’t walk, because he’s so active, and helpful with other things.  He can’t do the mowing of the lawn, but he’ll help them set their TVs up, help them program their cell phones.  So, sometimes my dad will say, “Bring me that tool.”  And, he’ll say, “Pop-Pop, I can’t bring you the tool, I can’t come upstairs.”  And, he’ll say, “Oh yeah, I forgot.”  So, the relationships have only changed in that they forget that he can’t walk.  

I think it kind of drove a wedge in between all of us and our dad a little bit, because of, because of the stress of the situation— and then them ultimately there getting divorced. And while none of us blame him for that, I think that it changed all of our relationships. I think it was, you know, it was hard for him, you know, to be the man who was married to a woman who became a quadriplegic and then was divorced, and there was all this, you know, there was a whole thing that went along with that, a lot of it not being true. I think that changed all of our relationships in odd ways. He and I were always very, very close; but I think me being forced to grow up more quickly put a stress on our relationship, more than I had ever known. Because there was an expectation now of the responsibilities I had in the household that I didn't have before. When she first came home, we would fight about the fact that, you know, there were certain things he felt my brother couldn't do because it just would be appropriate for him to do in taking care of her. And so those things fell to me.

I think for the better, I feel that we've probably come a lot closer. Adversity does an awful lot. When I was in service one year, under adverse condition, you got the guys that are your buddies backing you up, I mean you got they're back, they've got your back. In a family, unless you're so screwed up, I'd like to think that we all came together as a real unit. I mean, I remember the days in the hospital, the sitting there in tears wondering what's going on. You know, holding each other, caressing each other, doing what we needed to do to make each other feel better. As time went by, it's a lot stronger, and there's something much deeper than that. I mean, these are our kids, you love your kids. How can you love them more—when bad things happen, it says an awful lot when you get together, and I think you can love each other more. We have a common goal and the common goal is: mom, wife—this is who we're taking care of.

This has brought all of us, my three kids extremely close, they’re all best friends. My youngest, he was 15, 14 at the time. It did take him a year or two before, I think he was afraid. Maggie was fragile, you know, even though that was his sister, it was difficult. Now, I wouldn’t change, there’s been so many positive things that have come out of this. The relationships we have, I don’t think, in between she and I, it’s the most intimate relationship you can ever have with a person.

Yeah, my mom was, like so many moms, she was there to do whatever she needed to do because my dad was on the road a lot. My parents were just there, they were basically told back then “take him home, take care of him until you can’t, and then put him somewhere.” Now, that was well-intended professionals giving that kind of advice to my parents, but you know “if you can take care of him, take him home, and when you can’t, put him somewhere.” So, it wasn’t like “oh, he’s going to have relationships, and get married, and have a family if he wants, and a job and all that.” The expectation bar was so low back then that I was alive, and they ought to be happy about that and just take him home.