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As mothers celebrate their special day, these women share their tales of joy and heartbreak, the miracle of birth and the challenges of life.
By Times staff
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 12, 2002
TAROLYN PASCO
Tarolyn Pasco has a sweet, soft voice that makes her seem younger than 21. But she's dealing with the kinds of difficulties that make people grow up fast. Fortunately, her year-old son, Chubasco, is not one of them.
Chubasco is doing great. "He's happy, he's content, he's a boy who likes to stay out all day and play in the dirt, and he makes me smile," Pasco says. "He makes me feel like I have nothing to lose."
Loss has overshadowed much of Pasco's first year of motherhood.
Her own mother just died at 39, after suffering a series of terrible strokes. Pasco had taken care of her the past two years at their home in Oldsmar. She and Chubasco had to move in with an uncle after her mother's death.
About the same time, her fiance, Chubasco's father, was sent to jail. She doesn't want to say what he did, but he will remain there until September.
Pasco takes Chubasco to the Pinellas County Jail a couple of times a week, where the baby sees his dad only on the other side of a partition and hears his voice only through a telephone receiver.
While all this goes on, Pasco says, "We're surviving."
Pasco is asked what she'd like for Mother's Day. Anybody out there have a job for me? she asks. She has experience in telemarketing, housecleaning and child care.
If someone will hire her, she says, she's on her way. "Those are my goals," she says. "Financial security and our own place."
Well, the obvious first question is what was Fauna Beck doing with her 2-year-old son, Kiav, at a Florida Cannibis Action Network pot festival in Seminole a few weeks ago? With a lei of marijuana leaves around her neck, no less.
"We were there to listen to music and dance," she says. "That's about it."
Beck and Kiav are a pair of free spirits.
She's a 28-year-old single mom who loves travel and just got off the road, living now in Lutz to be near her mother, Kathy, who lives in Tampa.
"We last lived in Arizona, but we've been traveling," she says. "We were seeing the country."
Kiav got his unusual name out West. "His father had dug a kiva under the ground," Fauna says, describing a type of ceremonial prayer pit that such tribes as the Hopi Indians have dug for centuries.
Now she's settled in the Tampa Bay area for a while, looking for work. She calls herself a seamstress, skilled in arts and crafts.
And she's proud to call herself a mom, too. "Motherhood means everything to me," she says. "Just seeing him grow and seeing his smile means everything. What did I do to deserve this beautiful, beautiful being?"
His dreams have begun to seem more important to her than her own.
"I just want him to be the best that he can be."
Newborn Koby Hubbard, born on his mother's March 5 birthday, was not supposed to be here. Nor was his older brother, Austin, 3. That's why their mother, Deborah Hubbard, refers to the boys as her "miracle children."
Before their births, Hubbard, 35, had suffered a series of miscarriages over seven years.
She and her husband, Juan, were told that she had "bad eggs" and would never be able to have their own baby. One doctor suggested that they try an egg donation from one of her three sisters.
"I said, 'No, I'll have my own baby,' " Hubbard recalls. "Don't get your hopes up," the doctor replied.
After another miscarriage, "I said I was turning it over to God, and we joined a church, Without Walls International in Tampa," Hubbard said. "Three months later, I got pregnant again."
This time, she didn't go to see a doctor until she had safely cleared the first trimester. (All of her miscarriages had occurred in early pregnancy.) "The pastor prayed with us, and we kept going," she said. "I just had a good feeling."
Finally, after 12 weeks, "Juan and I went to a doctor, and we felt Austin's heartbeat. We cried."
Hubbard is a revenue specialist for the Department of Revenue in Tampa. Her husband is an engineer with Avaya Communications in St. Petersburg, where they live.
They have another miracle in mind.
"My husband says maybe we'll try one more time for a girl."
Motherhood takes unpredictable turns. Lynette Hijada would have never imagined herself going to Poland to fight for her child's future.
That's where she and her husband, Gino, went after the oldest of their three boys, Kahlil, 6, was born with cerebral palsy. The effort involved their entire Poinciana community, near Kissimmee, which raised about $20,000 to pay for two trips.
The Hijadas felt a Polish therapy program not offered in the United States was Kahlil's best hope. Doctors there described putting the child in a weighted body suit that would keep his spine aligned a certain way and then exercising his atrophied muscles.
Under the therapy, he was able to sit up for several minutes, raise himself on his hands and knees with his head up and drink from a cup. Those were major milestones in what will be a long struggle for Kahlil to be as independent as possible.
The Hijadas wanted to continue the trips, but more fundraising failed to cover the costs. Meanwhile, Lynette had two more boys -- Kasin, now 3, and Kolby, 14 months. So Kahlil is continuing therapy at a school in Kissimmee.
Kahlil's name has special meaning: In Arabic, it means "best friend." Lynette and Gino chose it because as husband and wife they are each other's best friend.
In having more children, they took a chance, but the two younger boys were both born with no disabilities. "Every addition to our family makes us that much bigger, better and stronger," Lynette says. "I love the fact that we're growing."
Frieda Wiebe, mother of two, grandmother of five, great-grandmother of 11, great-great-grandmother of one, turned 104 last month. Has she slowed a step? You decide:
On the subject of remarrying: "Nobody's knocked at my door."
On living in a nursing home: "Accept it and make the best of it."
On nosy questions: "I'd like to see this story before you print it."
Wiebe lives at the Sabal Palms nursing home in Largo because, she says, she would never want to burden her children. That's her gift to them.
Giving up even an iota of independence wasn't easy. This is a woman who still drove a car at 96. But after a bad fall a couple of years ago, Wiebe could no longer walk. It is her only serious health problem.
Women of her generation learned to make do at an early age. "We basically had three career choices." she says, "We could be teachers, nurses or secretaries."
She became a teacher in Nebraska. "I loved teaching, but I would have liked to have had the choices women have today," she says.
After her marriage to lumberman Ernest Wiebe, she discovered she had a number of other talents, among them running a drug store he purchased during World War II and drawing blueprints for his lumber company.
She also raised two daughters, helped raise two grandchildren and inevitably knew heartache as a mother, but she doesn't see any point in putting that in a newspaper.
Wiebe will say that every birthday now comes as a surprise, but she never has really thought of herself as old.
"Before I had my cataracts fixed, I couldn't see my wrinkles. After my surgery, I looked in the mirror and got the shock of my life."