Readers' responses: Courage runs in the family

By Alyson Ward

award@star-telegram.com

"Tell us about your brave mom," we said, urging readers to send us stories of mothers who have shown strength and courage, persistence and perseverance, tenacity and pluck. You did: Our e-mail and our mailbox overflowed with dozens of inspiring stories of bold women who have blazed trails, handled hardship, sacrificed for others and, above all, loved their children fiercely and beyond all reason.

Today, we celebrate Mother's Day by sharing a few of these stories -- tales of moms who have battled sickness and bank robbers, moms who have pushed boundaries and stood up to authority, moms who have weathered the sheer awfulness life can bring with an inspiring amount of grace, wit and bravery. Here are their stories.

Strong survivor: Jan Stevens

Lauren Stevens knows that life isn't always kind. Her mother, Jan Stevens, has faced a lifetime of losses, tests and setbacks that might have made a lesser woman give up. Instead, she has handled every struggle life has dealt -- and Lauren, 20, considers her mom a role model and a true survivor.

Jan was in her 20s, too, and had just moved to the United States from England, when her young husband died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. The loss was shocking. It was abrupt. It was surely devastating. And yet, she moved forward.

She married again in 1986 and, in her 30s, lost her firstborn child. Her baby boy was born prematurely and, after weeks in neonatal intensive care, couldn't hang on.

Again, Jan moved forward. Lauren was born a year later.

And in 2003, when Jan was in her 40s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She went through a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation. Her daughter, who was 13, watched her mother survive and move forward -- again.

In fact, her mom's treatment inspired Lauren to go into medicine; she is in nursing school at Texas Christian University. Seeing patients who have cancer, she says, makes her appreciate her mother's strength even more. Back then, she couldn't fully comprehend what fighting cancer meant -- "I knew she was sick, but I didn't really get it," she says. "Now I understand what she was going through."

Jan has been in remission for several years. Mother and daughter -- with a team of supportive friends -- celebrate every year by walking in the Komen Race for the Cure.

Jan has always been open about her life. "She's never been a closed book to me," her daughter says. And her openness has strengthened and prepared her daughter. Now, as she begins to understand just how her mother has struggled and persevered, Lauren says she admires her more than ever.

"Her perseverance through these major struggles," she wrote to us, "is what has shaped her to be the brave woman that I know today."

A brave recovery: Dorothy Buesing

"One mosquito bite turned my mom's life upside down," Natalie Sunde told us. A sudden illness left Dorothy Buesing paralyzed and nerve-damaged. But painstakingly, therapy session by therapy session, the 83-year-old is gaining strength and improving every day.

Six years ago, Dorothy was watering the lawn outside her Florida condo when she was bitten by a mosquito. She soon felt ill and called for an ambulance to take her to the hospital, where she spent the next several days in a semi-comatose state. The tests showed she had West Nile virus.

Natalie, who flew in from Texas, said it was shocking to see her mother, always so active, paralyzed.

"She couldn't lift her head off the pillow, she couldn't move her feet, she couldn't move her arms," Natalie recalls.

If she recovered, a hard road lay ahead for Dorothy, who is in her late 70s.

"There isn't really a whole lot you can do for it," says Natalie, "other than just keep activating the muscles and try to keep things working."

Dorothy did. She spent time at a rehab hospital, then moved to an assisted-living center, where she worked with a physical therapist. She has slowly learned how to walk again and strengthened her body.

"She was bound and determined she was not going to live the rest of her life in a wheelchair," Natalie says. So she did the work required to build back her strength.

Dorothy moved to Texas in 2009 to live with Natalie and her family in Arlington. She has continued to improve. She used to need a wheelchair when she went out, but she soon graduated to a walker, then a cane. Now she barely needs the cane to get around.

Dorothy takes chair yoga classes, which help her regain her strength and muscle control, three times a week at a branch of the Arlington YMCA.

Last month, she achieved the tree pose, balancing on one leg. In coming back from such a sudden, total setback, Dorothy has inspired her daughter.

"I will always admire my mom's determination and bravery in battling back to an active life," Natalie wrote to us. "She never gave up."

In the driver's seat: Mable Burroughs Williams

Mable Burroughs Williams was one of a dozen children in her family, growing up in the '20s in Fort Worth's old Rock Island Bottom neighborhood. Money was tight, opportunities were limited, and along the way, none of the family's five girls -- including Mable -- learned how to drive.

For years, she got by just fine. The men in the family were willing to drive the women wherever they needed to go, and Mable had five children and made it to the age of 54 without ever getting behind the wheel.

By then, it was about 1970. Mable decided she wanted to learn how to drive. And she had always told her children, daughter Sarah Walker says, "we can do anything if we put our minds to whatever we tried."

So that meant she had to do it, of course.

Mable got her brother-in-law to let her practice in his red-and-white '55 Cadillac. And once she had mastered the Caddy, with its fancy Hydra-Matic transmission, she marched over to a car dealership and bought herself a two-door, elongated, navy-blue Chevrolet.

Mable signed the paperwork, and the dealer handed her the keys.

There was just one problem: Her pretty blue Chevy had a manual transmission, and Mable hadn't learned to drive a stick shift. She couldn't drive it off the lot.

Mable was undaunted. She simply had the salesman deliver the car to her house, where it stayed until she learned how to drive it.

Mable's determination to learn how to drive -- twice -- inspired the rest of her family. "She set the pace for her sisters and brothers," her daughter says -- and sure enough, soon after Mable started driving her classic Chevrolet around town, three of her sisters decided they, too, would learn to drive and get cars of their own.

Mable died in 1992, but her story has been repeated over and over at family reunions, her daughter says, a treasured memory for her children that never fails to bring a laugh. And her determination still serves as an inspiration to her family.

Mom in medicine: Jennie T. Button

It takes courage to push boundaries. And that's what Dr. Jennie T. Button did for her entire career.

Besides raising three kids, "Mom has achieved what few mothers have," her daughter, Debbie Button-Reddehase, told us. In a time when women weren't expected to have careers, she became a doctor -- and went on breaking stereotypes and pushing boundaries for years to come.

Her parents emigrated from Belgrade to Detroit just before she was born in 1930, and she grew up learning English in school and teaching it to her family. Even as a child, she'd play doctor with her dolls, knowing early that she wanted a career in medicine.

In medical school in the mid-'50s, she was the only woman in her class of 200, studying osteopathic medicine at what is now Des Moines University. She married a physician, and they both practiced privately for a while. But then she made a career change: She became the first female osteopathic physician to be commissioned in the U.S. Public Health Service. A few years later, in 1978, she became the first woman to become a U.S. Coast Guard aviation medical officer.

Her boundary-pushing medical career landed her on Public Health Service recruitment posters in the '70s, when the agency wanted to recruit women.

"That was the advertisement: You're a woman; you can do it, too," Debbie recalls. For Jennie, it's always been a balance between family and career. When she was an intern at the hospital in Farmington, Mo., in 1957, she delivered three babies -- and gave birth to her first baby, a son named Bill -- all in one day.

Though retired from the Public Health Service, Jennie, who lives in Arlington, is still working part-time, her daughter says, doing "what she loves to do in occupational and preventive medicine." That dedication, that purpose, has been an inspiration to her children -- and it has been good for her, too. "That's what has kept her so active and youthful," Debbie says -- "continually staying busy helping others."

A graceful struggle: Rita Clinkscales

"It takes a brave woman to keep a sense of humor in the face of a terminal disease," Vonne Velez told us, "but that's my mom."

Vonne and her sister, Shawn Blue, are watching their mother suffer. And the strength she has shown -- not to mention the grace and the wit -- makes them love and admire her more each day.

Rita Clinkscales, who lives in Fort Worth, has been experiencing symptoms of ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, since 2008, when her right leg developed a persistent pain. Her foot was affected next; then she began to have problems with her speech. By summer 2009, doctors diagnosed ALS, a disease that attacks the nerves that control muscle movement, eventually stopping the brain from controlling voluntary movement at all.

The diagnosis was too difficult to process all at once.

"For about six months, she and I pretended she didn't have it," Vonne says.

But eventually, they faced it head-on and decided that whatever the future holds, they have the strength to handle it together.

"We don't know how to be not-strong people," Vonne says. "Even though this was the hand we were dealt -- and we don't like it, we wish we could turn it back in -- we just know how to be who we are: strong, happy people."

After a fire destroyed their home in 2009, Vonne and her son moved in with Rita, so Vonne is able to help when it is needed. Rita can still walk pretty well and can even drive, but speaking and breathing have gotten harder. Last week, she was scheduled to get a feeding tube and a device to help her breathe.

Her mother's speech is almost gone, Vonne says, but she can still communicate the important things.

"She prides herself: She can still say 'I love you' and she can drop the f-bomb," Vonne says, laughing. "My mother doesn't even curse, but that's something that comes out clearly. She's got both ends of the spectrum covered."

Rita and her daughters know that it is crucial to find moments to laugh.

When people find out her mother is sick, Vonne says, they'll often tell her -- for lack of anything else to say -- "You look great." It strikes them as so funny ("I don't know what people think ALS looks like," Rita will say) that the line has become a joke among mother and daughters. No matter how dark or tense the moment, they can always make each other laugh by saying, "But you look great!"

As this disease does its damage, Rita is showing the strength and good humor she has modeled for her daughters all their lives.

"She thinks she is interrupting our lives," Vonne wrote to us. "How can she not know that she IS our life, and we still learn from her every day?"

A mother with moxie: Elnora Ray

Elnora F. Ray was not a woman to be messed with. She had confidence. She had courage.

And one day in 1975, she was standing in line at her small-town Indiana bank when -- yes, just like in the movies -- a robber strode in with a sawed-off shotgun.

He ordered everybody to the floor. Everyone else complied, terrified, huddling down and covering their heads. But Elnora, who was in her 40s with three grown kids, was not about to follow the orders of some man robbing a bank. She informed him she had no intention of getting down on that floor. Then, for good measure, she registered her disapproval: She told him that his mother would be ashamed -- and that she must not have raised him right.

The robber was not amused. He hit her in the jaw with the gun, robbed the bank and ran out. She was in pain -- she had to go to the hospital later -- but Elnora didn't let that slow her down. She got up, ran to the window and got the license plate number and a description of the getaway car. With her help, police found the robber -- and the money -- in about half an hour.

Elnora's son Mike Ray was in Germany at the time, serving in the military. He got the news in a letter from his dad that started out, "Your Mom's OK, but ...."

Mike wasn't surprised his mom would stand up and lecture a man with a gun.

"She was very, very stubborn," he says, laughing.

That stubborn persistence made her a fiercely loyal friend, too, says Mike, who lives in Keller. If someone needed help, she'd be there. When friends and family were in the hospital, you couldn't keep her away.

Elnora died in January at 89. Her daughter, Sandra Lawson, who lives in Indiana, remembers her mother's stubborn streak with admiration.

Despite her bruised jaw, Sandra says, her mother never regretted standing up for herself in that bank.

"She said, 'I'd do it again,'" Sandra says. "And she would do it again, believe me."

The fearless fighter: Juanita Dueñez-Lazo

Arthur Lazo Jr. wrote to us about his mother, Juanita Dueñez-Lazo. She is "fearless," he told us, "sometimes even ferocious."

"I sound like a bulldog," his mother says later, on the phone. But when Juanita exhibits that ferocious determination it's usually on behalf of her son, who is 28.

"She has always fought for me," says Arthur, who lives with his family in Keller. "She fought for me, and she really helped me speak up for myself."

Arthur needed a fighter of a mother. He was born prematurely and then, at 2 months, had a blood vessel rupture in his head; it was essentially a stroke that affected his motor skills and gave him cerebral palsy. So Arthur grew up figuring out how to function with his disabilities -- and, like almost anybody who looks different and uses a wheelchair, he grew up being underestimated.

That's where his mother came in. Juanita fought to get her son out of resource classes and into a regular classroom. She pushed for the school to provide wheelchair-accessible bathrooms and to find a way to get him downstairs during fire drills. She was always at the school, advocating for something, making herself a pest at times to get basic accommodations for her son's needs.

And as she spoke up for her son, her son learned to do the same. He was only in the fourth or fifth grade when he requested a meeting with his school principal, for the purpose of "self-advocacy."

"You don't have to be isolated because you have a disability," Juanita says. "That's what I've always told Arthur: You get out there, you get out front, you need to be out there. And awesome things have happened to him."

Arthur graduated magna cum laude three years ago from Texas Woman's University. He plans to become a writer, starting with a project that recounts his life.

"She always tells me: Keep going," he says. "She's a great role model for me."

Alyson Ward, 817-390-7988

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