A Mother’s Touch : Learning Parenting in Darkness a Small Price to Pay for Answer to a Prayer

ORANGE — It’s something crinkly: crepe paper. Something squeaky smooth: a balloon. Something crisp: a bow.

“How beautiful!” LaNona declares of the gift-laden table, caressing the decorations and presents.

Her husband, Martin, gently steers her to a nearby chair. He flips on the tape recorder--LaNona’s “camera.”

This is her sixth baby shower--everyone wants to help, it seems. The gifts are modest but practical: booties, shirts, bottles, an occasional $5 bill. Their donors--the Hokes’ neighbors in a mobile home park--are mostly elderly people who live on fixed incomes.

One by one, Martin hands his wife the presents. He describes each card and reads it aloud: “ ‘For Your Baby.’ There’s a butterfly--want to see it? Here, it’s right here. Right here.” She rubs the embossed design: “Aw, that’s cute.”

LaNona’s long golden hair, usually pulled back into a braid, hangs loose and crimped over her shoulders. She aims her large brown eyes at the audience rather than at the gifts she fumbles to unwrap.

“This shirt has Mickey Mouse on it,” Martin narrates.

“Now we’ve got a shirt with Mickey and a bib with Minnie,” LaNona comments.

“Let’s just hope we don’t get a kid that’s Goofy,” her husband cracks.

“That,” LaNona tells him, “will depend on what kind of parents we turn out to be.”

They have been sweethearts for 20 years. Martin was 15 and LaNona 14 when he mustered the courage to meet the girl he had been gabbing on the telephone with for months.

Martin’s younger sister, Wendy, played matchmaker. A teachers’ aide at Anaheim High School, she was assigned to walking LaNona from class to class. Wendy took a liking to her charge. “She told me she wanted to give me her eyes,” says LaNona.

Little sis decided that her bookwormish brother needed a girlfriend. Whenever LaNona called her to chat, Wendy would force the receiver onto Martin. “We’d talk for hours at a time,” he says.

Finally, they arranged a date. Martin’s mother drove him to LaNona’s house in Fullerton and dropped him off. “I thought, how embarrassing, I’m being chauffeured,” Martin says.

He felt nervous about spending the evening with a blind person: “It was a new experience, and I was scared.” But when his telephone buddy appeared at the door, his doubts dissolved. “I couldn’t get over how beautiful she was.”

From that moment on, the couple were inseparable. They studied together almost every night, Martin reading LaNona’s textbooks to her.

At first, neither of their mothers was comfortable with the budding relationship.

“I couldn’t see Marty going with a blind girl,” says Theresa Foster, who is divorced from Martin’s father. “It seemed like such a big responsibility.”

And her counterpart meanwhile worried about Martin’s disadvantage--epilepsy, which he has suffered since infancy. “I had mixed feelings,” admits LaNona’s mom, Jan Briley.

But by the time the couple married in 1981, both had won the approval of each others’ families. “No one in this world would ever have parted them,” says Foster. “They’re so close. Marty has often told me, ‘Mom, if something happened to LaNona, I wouldn’t want to live anymore. I would be lost.’ ”

Before they wed, LaNona earned an associate of arts degree in child development at Fullerton College while Martin took engineering courses. As he had in high school, Martin helped LaNona study--even attending classes with her periodically.

Acting as helpmate to his soul mate is a calling that Martin embraces. “I’m her seeing-eye dog,” he says with obvious pride.

He would help her teach preschool, if someone would just give her a job. “Schools won’t hire me because they’re concerned about the children’s safety, which I can understand,” LaNona explains.

“I could go with her to the school and be her eyes,” Martin schemes.

Instead of pursuing her field, LaNona has worked as an order-taker for Carl’s Jr. restaurants over the past 10 years.

“We were eating at a Carl’s Jr. one day and Marty said, ‘I think I’ll fill out a job application while I’m here.’ I said, ‘Fill one out for me, too,’ ” LaNona recalls.

“I said, ‘Honey, they aren’t going to hire you--you’re blind,’ ” says Martin.

LaNona got the job and Martin didn’t.

She was the first blind person ever employed by the fast-food chain; local media briefly treated her like a small-town celebrity. But the novelty soon wore thin, and LaNona became antsy to do something more than punch buttons at a drive-through window.

“I’ve never gotten a promotion, even though I’ve been a reliable employee,” she complains. “They’ll never make me a manager, because they think a blind person couldn’t handle it. But a sighted person wants new challenges, and so do I.”

Martin worked as an electronics technician until he was laid off in 1985, the year his epileptic seizures--latent since adolescence--suddenly reoccured. He hasn’t had a full-time job since.

Last year he joined his wife at Carl’s Jr., cooking and serving food at a restaurant within walking distance of his home. LaNona takes the bus to an Anaheim branch.

The couple scrape by on their part-time, just-above-minimum-wage salaries. LaNona wins most of their luxuries--a television, an answering machine, a stereo system, dinners out--on radio contests. “I can be half asleep and hear, ‘Be the fifth caller . . .’ and I’m on the telephone,” she says.

Martin and LaNona “know how to stretch a dollar,” Foster says. “They live on very little and seem to get by great. Marty has never asked me for money, though I’d help him in a second. They don’t have much and they don’t ask for much.

“But then, they do have an awful lot. They have a lot of faith in God and a lot of love for each other. And they finally have a baby on the way. Heaven knows, they’ve been wanting a baby forever.”

The Hokes attribute their long-awaited pregnancy to a faith healer at Melodyland Christian Center, a fundamentalist congregation in Anaheim.

They had gone seeking a cure for LaNona’s blindness and Martin’s epilepsy, and threw in their apparent infertility while they were at it. A month later, one out of three prayers had been answered.

Except for LaNona’s high blood pressure, the pregnancy has gone well. The biggest challenge is still to come.

“Handicapped people have had children before,” shrugs LaNona, who could give birth any day now. “One of my blind friends has three children.”

Martin, as always, will be the visual translator. “I hope he tells me about every little facial expression,” she says. Then, in an uncharacteristic display of regret, she muses, “I’ll miss the baby’s first smile, I’ll miss so much.”

She quickly regains her stoic, spunky composure: “But I’ll be able to hear the giggles, the cries, the sounds.”

Although he can serve as the couple’s “eyes,” Martin will be limited by his own handicap. His epilepsy prevents him from driving a car; he and LaNona have relied on Briley to taxi them back and forth to doctor’s appointments. And if his recent bout of frequent seizures continues, he might have to avoid carrying the baby. “I’m afraid I’ll drop the baby in the middle of an attack,” he says.

“I’ll let LaNona handle it,” Martin adds with a wink.

“Oh, no, you won’t!” she corrects. “You’re helping me with this kid.”

There are other allowances they must make--on top of the many considerations and insecurities that all new parents face. The paper-versus-cloth diaper dilemma was easily resolved for LaNona; cloth diapers require pins and she doesn’t want to risk pricking her child. The changing table, a gift, probably will go to waste; for blind parents, diapering is conducted most safely with the baby inside the crib rather than on a flat-edged surface.

Martin looks on the bright side: “This child will be raised by unique parents, so it will be a unique child.”

Children of blind parents, he has read, tend to become proud “little helpers”--a role Martin himself has found fulfilling. “They think they’re the neatest things on earth,” he says.

For now, it’s all secondhand information, as he and LaNona wait. LaNona is on maternity leave, and Martin has just arrived home from work. They sit at their cluttered kitchen table in a trailer home bursting with collectibles--photographs, record albums, stray dishes, the 18-volume Braille Bible. Crowded though it is, LaNona negotiates her habitat with skill honed by familiarity.

She speaks of color as though she comprehends it: “My brother’s eyes are more hazel than they are brown.” “I guess somebody knows something we don’t--we’ve gotten more blue baby clothes than pink.”

But a brain tumor that damaged her optic nerve when she was 6 left her with no recollection of hazel, brown, blue or pink.

For two years, she lay in a coma in the downstairs bedroom of her grandmother’s Fullerton home. When she at last regained consciousness, LaNona--a onetime dancer and beauty pageant finalist--had to start from scratch in learning to walk and talk.

“Perhaps part of the reason I wanted a baby so badly was to relive the childhood that I missed,” she says.

This is the house that LaNona grew up in.

“She went into convulsions right here on this floor,” says her mother’s mother, LouEllan Olson, nodding toward the middle of her living room. Olson then gestures over her shoulder. “She spent two years in this bedroom, while she was in her coma.”

Olson and her recently deceased husband, Eldin--a railroad machinist--bought the pleasant house in 1948. Full of dainty knickknacks and prim antique furniture, it looks every bit the stereotypical time-forgotten, heart-warming grandparents’ home.

A newly divorced mom with four small children, Jan Briley--then Jan Kennedy--moved her brood in with her parents. The Olsons themselves had only one child, so they doted on the adorable youngsters.

Those were the days when “Nonie,” the second oldest, tap-danced and baton-twirled and rode her bicycle all over the neighborhood and taught her three brothers to roller-skate. “She had the best coordination,” says Olson.

LaNona’s mother ran Miss Jan’s Modeling Agency in Anaheim, and her grandmother owned a beauty salon in Fullerton--so the two women were always trying to doll up their tomboy. “She loved to shop for frilly clothes but she hated wearing them,” Olson says.

The little girl was as smart as she was athletic, says her grandmother, still boastfully: “She read 42 books in first grade.”

Olson fetches a professional photograph of Nonie, taken for the 1963 Little Miss America Contest at the Hollywood Bowl. Nonie danced her way to first runner-up in the competition.

The photo captures a beautiful, towheaded child with a dreamy expression on her face. Less than a month later, she would suffer the violent seizure that marked a new era in hers and her family’s lives. “We were supposed to go to Disneyland the next day,” remembers Briley. “Her big brother refused to ever go to Disneyland again until Nonie could come with us.”

Doctors soon detected an inoperable malignant tumor in LaNona’s brain stem. The girl underwent radiation therapy, which destroyed the tumor but failed to rouse her from her coma. After a few months in the hospital, she was released to die at home.

There LaNona languished, eyes open in a vacant stare, mouth frozen in a crooked grin. Nurses kept watch over the tube-fed child day in and day out. Family members took turns sitting by her side, talking to her as if she were awake.

“We had a lot of loving care in this home,” says her grandmother.

On LaNona’s seventh birthday, her mother threw a party and invited the children with whom Nonie once played. For a group snapshot of the event, Briley dressed up the comatose girl and scooped her fragile body out of bed.

The moment would become a painful memory. In the infamous picture, the birthday girl is draped over her mother like a limp stick figure--her excruciatingly thin legs and arms dangling lifelessly.

“I realize now, in 20-20 hindsight, that I did this for me--not for Nonie,” Briley says of the photo. “Minutes after it was taken she went into a seizure and we had to call the paramedics. We almost lost her that day.”

Against all odds, LaNona gradually emerged from her coma. But its cause--a malignant glioma--left her partially paralyzed, deaf in one ear and totally blind. The tumor erased the memory of her sighted years, although she seemed to recognize the people who had coddled her throughout her unconsciousness.

Eventually, LaNona recovered full movement with physical therapy. She learned to speak articulately and read Braille within a few years.

LaNona remained close to her grandparents, even after her mom remarried in 1969 and moved to another house in Fullerton. The Olsons preserved Nonie’s bedroom for her to use at will.

She and her grandmother share a private sense of humor about her blindness. “Now, Nonie, if you see a picture you don’t like, just tell me and I’ll throw it away,” Olson wryly says.

The two women who raised LaNona are simultaneously excited and anxious about the baby. As Martin previously put it, “They worry that either I’ll fall on top of it or Nonie will knock it off a table.”

“Sometimes I think they should move in here with me,” confides Olson, who at 83 is still spritely and agile. “I know they want their independence, and we don’t want to look like we’re bossing things. But if need be, I’ll go over to their place and sleep on a chair.”

LaNona is now a week overdue and her obstetrician, Karen Koe at Kaiser Permanente in Anaheim, has decided to induce labor soon. “Pick a day this week,” the doctor tells her patient.

The mother-to-be’s blood pressure is too high for comfort--180 over 100. Still, LaNona balks at her doctor’s orders--she had hoped for a completely natural childbirth. “I’m going to go hide in a motel somewhere,” she says, only half kidding.

“Let’s just go in and have it done, dear,” counsels Martin. After a bit more hemming and hawing, LaNona reluctantly consents to Thursday, May 2.

“Is everything OK with the baby?” she asks Koe. Yes, answers the doctor, everything appears to be fine. Then a few minutes later: “Is everything normal?” Yes, Koe reassures her.

“Every time I go to church, people say, ‘Oh, you’re not very big,’ ” LaNona says. “Nothing’s wrong, right?”

“Don’t worry what other people say,” Koe responds. “People always comment on size, but they don’t know how big the baby actually is.”

In the lobby, a nurse makes the mistake of commenting on size: “You don’t look like some ladies do at this stage.”

“What do you mean, I don’t look like some ladies do?” LaNona says.

When Koe reappears to schedule a hospital check-in time, LaNona murmurs to her husband, “Should we ask her about that thing I was worried about?”

Without waiting for his reply, she timidly broaches her inquiry: “Remember that I was paralyzed when I was a child? Will that have anything to do with whether I can have a normal delivery? Is there a chance that I won’t be able to push?”

It’s something fuzzy: hair. Something protruding: a nose. Something pliant: a mouth. Something curved: an ear.

Minutes old, Daniel Martin Hoke lies on his mother’s stomach, loudly complaining about his rude entrance into this strange environment. LaNona lightly touches him from head to foot.

“Oh, we did it. Oh, our baby,” she says. “What does he look like?”

“Half of you and half of me,” her husband answers. “Strawberry blond, big brown eyes.”

Despite LaNona’s fears, the delivery was better than merely normal. It was abnormal--abnormally quick. LaNona’s hard labor lasted less than two hours. At 2:23 p.m. on May 3, 1991, Daniel arrived weighing 7 pounds, 12 ounces and measuring 20 inches.

One instant, LaNona hears the baby crying. The next instant, she doesn’t. “They took the baby?” she asks.

“To clean him,” Martin explains.

One instant, LaNona assumes she is done with the pain. The next instant, she feels sharp pinches. “What are you doing?” she demands.

“Stitching the skin we had to cut,” says the doctor.

A nurse soon returns the cozily swaddled baby and wheels mother and child to a room upstairs. “He’s staring at you,” says the nurse.

“He is? And he has big brown eyes?” LaNona queries. She silently rocks her baby.

Three generations of mothers gather in the room: Briley’s mother, LaNona’s and Martin’s mothers, Daniel’s mother.

As LaNona dozes, the other moms giddily exchange chatter and laughter. Olson is off and talking about the good ol’ days. “When I had my baby, we didn’t have all these advice books,” she says disdainfully. “We did it by instinct. Motherhood is the most natural thing in the world.”

After demonstrating baby’s first bath to Briley--who will stay with the new parents until they get their bearings--a nurse helps LaNona breast-feed the child. LaNona gropes for Daniel’s face to feel his cheeks contract and expand.

A couple of days later, the extended family is on its the way home. Martin and Briley pack the car while LaNona attempts to swaddle her child--for the first time without assistance.

Does the blanket go this way or that? Where is a corner? Oh, here. Now where’s another corner? Is the baby in the middle of the blanket?

“I hope I can do this,” LaNona says, near tears.

Swaddling, nursing, diapering, bathing--intimidating tasks for any new parent, much less one who must learn them in darkness.

She cuddles that which makes all those frustrations worthwhile for a mother. It’s something soft and tiny and wondrous.