Stories from my mother #6 - Memories of Dawn

Dawn was always sensitive from the very beginning. I remember when she was very little and her cousin wasn’t feeling well. She just stayed by her side comforting her.

One of my favorite memories was when we took a plane ride to Arizona when she  was 

3 ½. On the  plane we ran into rough weather and she got air sick. She would throw up and then sing “Mary had a little lamb”. We went travel camping in AZ and  CA. We only stayed a couple of nights in each place. When we would be at a campsite and Dawn would disappear, we could always find her in the car. That was the only thing that remained the same. We went to Disneyland and she fell and cut her lip. She kept crying, “I want a bandaid., I want a bandaid”. Bandaids would cure anything. Kind of hard to put one on a lip! She was so good on the whole trip. Her favorite  toy was a stuffed duck. It went everywhere with her, even at camp. She  wore it out and I remade it. 

 One of the memories was told to me by Eddie’s first grade teacher. In size, he passed her out when he was about 4. Dawn took him to school the first day and holding his hand she looked up at him and said, “This is my ‘little’ brother, Eddie.

When she started school, she started throwing up at the busstop. Apparently something about the bus trip was frightening her, so I started driving her to school. Then she started throwing up during lunch. A teacher from across the hall supervised the brown baggers who stayed in the classroom. She often yelled at the students, and  Dawn wasn’t used to hearing that, so she was  getting upset, so I got permission to bring her home for lunch.    After a while she got settled down and was able to handle both of those issues.

Before she started school, she played with 2 girls who lived nearby, but they were a year younger than her, and at school she met a girl, Pammy, who lived a little further away, but within walking distance. Pammy spent most of her time here. They stayed real close up to about 8^th grade.

In high school, the special ed kids were mainstreamed for some of the extra curricular activities and Dawn  didn’t like the way other kids made fun of them. She always said she wasn’t going to go to college. Twelve years was long enough to go to school but said she’d like to work with them and asked what kind of training it would take, so I said it depended  on what you wanted to do for them. She saw an ad for a CS facility, Twelveacres in California. I suggested she write to them and ask. Her reply came in a telephone call from the administrator, who said they had a volunteer program for the summer, and she could go there and find out if that’s what she really wanted to do. So off she went. We watched our ’little’ girl go out to get on a big 747 to meet an unknown person at the airport and spend the summer. Now she knew she would go to college. She went to Southern CT U  and stayed in an off-campus student apartment . At the end of her first semester, she was asked by the landlord to be the ass’t house manager. Even though she was the youngest one there, he saw something in her that was right for the job. It resulted in getting free rent for one semester each year. She went back to Twelveacres every summer, and then permanently after graduation. 

When Dawn turned 18, she sent her Dad and me 18 roses. She was always thinking of others.

When we decided to sponsor another AFS students; Rosita, from Barbados, came to live with us for a year. Dawn went out  of her way to make her feel comfortable,  which wasn’t easy as Rosita was very quiet , but they got along well.

Even though she lived across the country, she always kept in touch and we were close in thought.