Dear Readers, This week, my son turned 17. He was the baby who made me a momma — a profound day that marks both his arrival in this world and my initiation into the sisterhood of mothers. His birth was traumatic: He suffered from meconium aspiration, meaning he had inhaled his own poop. It was in his lungs and stomach. He had to be airlifted to the NICU in San Antonio, where nurses joked that my 9-pound, 7-ounce baby looked like he’d eaten one of the preemies. That humor gave me hope, a small comfort in the chaos.
Even though he was full of IT at birth, his eyes turned out to be hazel rather than brown like mine or blue like his dad’s. Seventeen years later, his sweet, sweet eyes still light up my life, and though I can’t hug him in person on his birthday, I’ll see him in Europe in just a few weeks. He’s my world, and I can’t imagine the grief of our local mother who tragically lost her 17-year-old son to Cape’s Dam as well as the inefficiency of the local city and county governments.
Some of you may remember when I attended every city council meeting for a whole year, advocating each and every time for the removal of Cape’s Dam. At one of those meetings, I held a sign over my head for hours that simply read, “Free the River.” Folks began to refer to me as “That Dam Lady” though I’m pretty sure there was an “n” in there.
