Mother's Day

An American town that had only been known as PO Box 1663, got its name after the secret was out. Los Alamos.  Located on the mesas northwest of Santa Fe, it was secured by limiting access to a single, narrow, switchbacked mountain road.  About a year before I was born in this remote secret city, Little Boy, the uranium bomb devastated Hiroshima followed three days later the plutonium bomb, Fat Man, over Nagasaki.  These weapons were intended to avoid an invasion of Japan and show the futility of continuing the war.  Both bomb designs worked.  They worked technically and accomplished their intended purpose.  The explosions ended the war and scorched the earth announcing the birth of the atomic age.  But this blog post isn’t about the atomic bomb nor about my birth.

 Mother’s Day came to a close just hours ago.  For every Mother’s Day I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by great women who are phenomenal mothers.  My wife, daughters and mother-in-law have each added to the accumulated wisdom and highest regard for mothers everywhere.  The annual one day celebration of motherhood falls far short of appropriate recognition.

Today, in thinking about the blog, it was the adversity that mothers willingly accept on behalf of their families that came to mind. Specifically, I tried to imagine those days after WWII for my mother and for the families of all the people involved in, and around, the Manhattan Project.  What was it like to be a young mom in that time and in that place?

 In late 1945 WWII was over but the return to any semblance of normality was many months or even years away.  After four years of total dedication to the war effort and constant separation from spouses, military families (and at that time this meant virtually every family) had borne the burden of the world war. The nation measured the cost in lost loved-ones, careers foregone or set aside, all the taxes necessary to pay for what was needed, and extended periods where families were separated by thousands of miles for months upon months.  There were no cell phones, no Skype and a treasured letter could take weeks to reach a loved one.

After four long years, following her secret marriage that quietly took place twenty days after Pearl Harbor, my mother learned that her husband was returning from his war assignment.  For most of those years he was stationed in India and Burma. For two years, he led one of the crews who built and defended the Burma Road.  This was not a glamorous place.  It was even further from home than Europe or the South Pacific.  Then, after a short few weeks at home in Illinois, he was assigned to some desolate place in New Mexico that really didn’t have a name.  A military base for logistical support for the gadgets being built in a remote secret village needed to be built.

Mom, who already had one son and another baby soon on the way, would leave the home she had made for her family during the war and join her husband in a place so different from Illinois, that she might as well have been moving to Burma.  Sandia Base would be built outside of Albuquerque and they would be one of the first families to live there.  From this base, the US Army would protect and handle nuclear products, help the people who created them, respond to the crises that followed and deal with the consequences that were unknown when the work began.

This picture is hard to draw.  They were moving to an area that was mostly desert, where they didn’t know anyone, over a thousand miles from any family or friends, (air travel for civilians really hadn’t begun yet), and live in married officer’s quarters (which would be constructed as temporary buildings).  She had to accept the fact that her husband’s work would be so secret that he would often leave on a moment’s notice, couldn’t tell her when he was leaving, where he was going, when he would return nor about the dangers that might await him.  The closest military services (like a hospital or even a base exchange) were located in a remote, mountain town called Los Alamos – a long drive on perilous roads. 

My mother’s mother had died as a direct result of a post child birth hemorrhage.  Mom was raised by aunts and uncles and never knew her mother.  With all of this in mind, mom chose to move directly into the jaws of the great unknown so we could be a family – a family that had never had a chance for a normal start.  One son, a toddler in diapers, her husband and she would overcome the challenges.  At that time she couldn’t have foreseen the birth of her second son would be so difficult – that he would be born with such critical needs.  

The problems of the pregnancy required that mom move to Los Alamos weeks before her due date.  She stayed in the hospital that was a few rooms next to an old ranch school that predated the project.  There she waited – separated from her son and often from her husband.  The birth was difficult and the baby needed surgery by a rare specialist – very few had tried this surgery before.  Fewer still had been successful.  Many such babies didn't survive.  Mom saw it through day by day.

So this blog post is to honor mothers.  Extraordinary mothers who do extraordinary things for their families.  When they are in the midst of this work, few of them can see the courage and nobility of what they do.  It is, in fact, the world’s oldest and most essential calling.

--td