(This is the text of a short talk during a Lenten Worship)
I think I was very fortunate as I was born to parents for whom their Christian faith was very important. It wasn’t a home where Christianity was thrust down your throat but I was very much aware that there were certain expectations of how I was being brought up that were to do with having a faith in God. Both my parents were very active both in the church and in the charitable work they took part in outside of the church. I accompanied them to church each Sunday and went out to Sunday School during the sermon until after communion……that is until a little boy showed me something he shouldn’t and I then stayed throughout but never felt this a burden as Croydon Parish Church was rather like St John’s Keele…..plenty to look at during lengthy sermons and good singing to listen to.
From the age of about 7, I thought I would like to work with children as I accompanied my mother to the local Children’s Society home where she was part of the house committee. I felt real sympathy and love for these children who had no parents and had to share a house mother (usually a kindly spinster) with six or seven others.
I learned about the Christian faith as I went along and accepted that this was the right thing. At about 10 I was one of the children chosen to visit the local hospital to take along the toys we had gathered through the scheme run by The London Evening News…’Toy for a sick child’. This was a real life changing experience and I knew from then that I ought to be a children’s nurse….the dreadfully poorly children, shut up in hospital and not allowed to be visited by their mothers except for an hotwice a week. When I talked about this, someone used the word ‘vocation’ and I had to ask what this meant. Yes, I really DID feel called by God to do this work. For the next few years all sorts of people tried to dissuade me….my father….”its really hard work and the pay is nothing”….the school……”we expect something far more academic from you…you are a bright girl, you should be aiming for university”….my friends,…”you’ll always be wearing a uniform and never be able to afford nice fashions and you’ll never meet boys”. This of course made me more determined to follow my heart and where I felt I was being called…Yes…..I DID think that.
I met Maeve when I was three weeks into my first ward placement. She was two and a half and was being nursed in a cubicle inside an oxygen tent. She had cystic fibrosis and had a short life expectancy, as children with that dreadful dirty disease did in the 190’s. Her family were in Northern Ireland. I should not have been allowed to care for a cubicled child…you had to be on your third placement for that, but I suppose someone was off sick. She was a very poorly sad little girl, absolutely no energy or appetite very pale and with great difficulty in breathing. We struck up a friendship and I had raised a smile and even a little laugh from her from her on several occasions in those first hours together. I found that I was ‘specialing’ her every time I was on duty…..52hours a week in those days. One morning we were having a tickle & a romp as I washed her and the ward sister put her head round the door with the consultant close behind….”Nurse don’t get too fond of Maeve, she’s going to die soon”.
This was the first time I think I had truly questioned why the Almighty could allow so much suffering. This was the moment when I first began to question my faith with any depth. But this was when I knew that the reason I was here was so that I could do all in my power to relieve some of this suffering. Shortly after that I met Maeve’s’s mother and her five older brothers who had travelled from Ireland to visit her. They were a loving, but very impoverished family who had sent Maeve to Great Ormond Street because they believed this was the only place where she might get better. For them it was a heart rending sacrifice but they were sure this would be the very best for their treasured little girl. maeve died a couple of months later. But of course she and her loving mother are still very much alive in my heart even after fifty four years.
A few years and much experience later I met Sharon. She was also about two. She was
brought to the ward by her parents and seven year old brother with a diagnosis of
‘failure to thrive’. It was odd, she was wheeled in, in her very smart pushchair.
Her mother was a very glamorous model and her father and brother were also exquisitely
dressed…..and so was Sharon. She looked pale and subdued and readily lay down in
her cot. She apparently was a very poor eater, and always miserable and crying. She
had one toy with her, a brand new teddy bear from Hamleys. Her parents left straight
away and Sharon just lay there staring at the other children in the ward. Her parents
had said she had no favourite food so we sat her with a small group of other toddlers
with a sausage and mashed potato. She seemed to quite like this but then indicated
that she wanted to get back in her cot. She allowed the doctors and nurses to undress
her, take some blood and have an x-
On a dark and stormy night a few years later in Leeds I received a call from a public
phone box from a young girl whispering that “the baby is coming and it’s early”.
The house was a one-
My own faith jogged along for the next decade. As a mother I tried to instil the
same Christian values as had guided my own up-
I returned to work and it seemed to become easier to let my faith slide as shift working, growing children and some charity work intervened.
I was in charge of the Neonatal unit one night, all 30 cots were occupied and we were extremely busy and the two paediatricians were dealing with emergencies..….when baby 31 was rushed through the door in the arms of a midwife. “you’ll have to take this one Sister, her mother’s in acute multiple organ failure and is being transferred to Birmingham and we’ve now found baby’s not breathing”.
On the resuscitation table I could see that she was a perfectly formed full-
Neither of these extremely premature babies could be disconnected although both were unlikely to survive. With a commotion at the door I left the only available person, the ward domestic ‘bagging’ the baby as I went to see what was happening. The baby’s father was fighting his way in to see his little one before getting in the RAF helicopter to go with his wife to Birmingham. “Sister please look after my little girl I think I’m going to lose them both…..He clung onto my arm saying “I want her to be baptised, we are Christians and I don’t want her to die without Baptism, please sister” ….What name…… “we had only got a boy’s name and that was George”.
A quick call was made to the chaplain who was in Cheadle sitting with a dying man. So with his permission I baptised Georgina Marie (because that was her mum’s name) and because we could do nothing else we covered her in a pink cotton blanket, lay her flat on the rescus. trolley and moved away to care for all those other poorly preterms who had been neglected and not received their hourly care. I prayed lots more of those arrow prayers….had I done the right thing….I had already broken two rules……someone would report me and I’d be suspended…..I’d made a decision I had no right to make and intubated without permission…..
Twenty minutes later I heard a shout……Georgina had kicked off her blanket and spat out her airway and was moving her arms and legs.
No one has ever been able to medically explain this and I don’t want them to. Georgina’s mother survived, although quite disabled, and Georgina herself grew and developed perfectly normally.
I’m not a great thinker about my faith, in fact I’m very lazy about that. As time went on I still continued to have doubts and needed some replenishment to keep me on my ‘Journey’. After I recovered from my brain tumour I knew that God still had a purpose for me. I found the Alpha course helped to renew and replenish my beliefs to a certain extent but there was one person who finally made me feel at home in my own beliefs and that was someone who was such a fine example of a Christian yet still perfectly normal! So I want to remember, our late reader Alan Taylor who to me was such a kind and fatherly inspiration.
So now…its Mothering Sunday so let’s remember those mothers I’ve mentioned and in the prayers which follow think of mothers like Maeve’s and mothers like Sharons’s who needed help to mother. Think about Donna and her simple and overriding mother love, and of God’s restoration of Georgina to her mother. These people have inspired me to keep my faith.
AMEN
Angela Studd
Faith and Mothers