Love Without Limits : Physically Challenged Couple Give Birth to Hope--and a Baby

It’s something crinkly: crepe paper. Something squeaky smooth: a balloon. Something crisp: a bow.

“How beautiful!” LaNona declares of the gift-laden table, caressing the decorations and presents.

Her husband, Martin, gently steers her to a nearby chair. He flips on the tape recorder--LaNona’s “camera.”

This is her sixth baby shower--everyone wants to help, it seems. The gifts are modest but practical: booties, shirts, bottles, an occasional $5 bill. Their donors--the Hokes’ neighbors in a mobile home park--are mostly elderly people who live on fixed incomes.

One by one, Martin hands his wife the presents. He describes each card and reads it aloud: “ ‘For Your Baby.’ There’s a butterfly--want to see it? Here, it’s right here. Right here.” She rubs the embossed design: “Aw, that’s cute.”

LaNona’s long golden hair, usually pulled back into a braid, hangs loose and crimped over her shoulders. She aims her large brown eyes at the audience rather than at the gifts she fumbles to unwrap.

“This shirt has Mickey Mouse on it,” Martin narrates.

“Now we’ve got a shirt with Mickey and a bib with Minnie,” LaNona comments.

“Let’s just hope we don’t get a kid that’s Goofy,” her husband cracks.

“That,” LaNona tells him, “will depend on what kind of parents we turn out to be.”

They have been sweethearts for 20 years. Martin was 15 and LaNona 14 when he mustered the courage to meet the girl he had been gabbing on the telephone with for months.

Martin’s younger sister, Wendy, played matchmaker. A teachers’ aide at Anaheim High School, she was assigned to walking LaNona from class to class. Wendy took a liking to her charge. “She told me she wanted to give me her eyes,” says LaNona.

Little sis decided that her bookwormish brother needed a girlfriend. Whenever LaNona called her to chat, Wendy would force the receiver onto Martin. “We’d talk for hours at a time,” he says.

Finally, they arranged a date. Martin’s mother drove him to LaNona’s house in Fullerton and dropped him off.

He felt nervous about spending the evening with a blind person. . . . But when his telephone buddy appeared at the door, his doubts dissolved. “I couldn’t get over how beautiful she was.”

From that moment on, they were inseparable. They studied together almost every night, Martin reading LaNona’s books to her. At first, neither of their mothers was comfortable with the budding relationship.

“I couldn’t see Marty going with a blind girl,” says Theresa Foster, who is divorced from Martin’s father. “It seemed like such a big responsibility.” Her counterpart, meanwhile, worried about Martin’s epilepsy, which he has had since infancy. “I had mixed feelings,” admits LaNona’s mom, Jan Briley.

But by the time the couple married in 1981, they had won the approval of both families. “No one in this world would ever have parted them,” says Foster. “They’re so close. Marty has often told me, ‘Mom, if something happened to LaNona, I wouldn’t want to live any more. I would be lost.’ ”

Before they wed, LaNona earned an associate of arts degree in child development at Fullerton College while Martin took engineering courses. As he had in high school, Martin helped LaNona study--even attending classes with her periodically.

Over the last 10 years, LaNona has worked as an order-taker for Carl’s Jr. restaurants. “We were eating at a Carl’s Jr. one day and Marty said, ‘I think I’ll fill out a job application while I’m here.’ I said, ‘Fill one out for me, too,’ ” LaNona recalls.

“I said, ‘Honey, they aren’t going to hire you--you’re blind,’ ” says Martin. LaNona got the job and Martin didn’t.

She was the first blind person employed by the fast-food chain; local media briefly treated her like a small-town celebrity.

Martin worked as an electronics technician until he was laid off in 1985, the year his epileptic seizures--latent since adolescence--recurred. He hasn’t had a full-time job since.

Last year he joined his wife at Carl’s Jr., working at a restaurant within walking distance of his home. LaNona takes the bus to an Anaheim branch.

The couple scrape by on their part-time, just-above-minimum-wage salaries. LaNona wins most of their luxuries--a television, an answering machine, a stereo system, dinners out--on radio contests. “I can be half asleep and hear, ‘Be the fifth caller . . .’ and I’m on the telephone,” she says.

Martin and LaNona “know how to stretch a dollar,” Foster says. “They live on very little and seem to get by great. . . . But then, they do have an awful lot. They have a lot of faith in God and a lot of love for each other. And they finally have a baby on the way.”

The Hokes believe their long-awaited pregnancy is directly related to their faith.

They had gone to meet with a minister at Melodyland Christian Center, a fundamentalist congregation in Anaheim. They were seeking a cure for LaNona’s blindness and Martin’s epilepsy and mentioned their apparent infertility while they were at it. A month later, one of three prayers had been answered.

Martin will be the visual translator for LaNona and her baby. “I hope he tells me about every little facial expression,” she says as her pregnancy nears an end. Then, in an uncharacteristic display of regret, she muses, “I’ll miss the baby’s first smile, I’ll miss so much.”

She quickly regains her stoic composure: “But I’ll be able to hear the giggles, the cries, the sounds.”

Although he can serve as the couple’s “eyes,” Martin will be limited by his epilepsy, which prevents him from driving; he and LaNona have relied on Briley to taxi them to doctor’s appointments. And if his bout of frequent seizures continues, he might have to avoid carrying the baby.

“I’ll let LaNona handle it,” Martin adds with a wink.

“Oh, no, you won’t!” she corrects. “You’re helping me with this kid.”

There are other allowances they must make--on top of what all new parents face. The paper-versus-cloth diaper dilemma was easily resolved for LaNona; cloth diapers require pins and she doesn’t want to risk pricking her child.

All in all, Martin says: “This child will be raised by unique parents, so it will be a unique child.”

Children of blind parents, he has read, tend to become proud “little helpers”--a role Martin himself has found fulfilling. “They think they’re the neatest things on earth,” he says.

For now, it’s all secondhand information, as he and LaNona wait.

LaNona is on maternity leave, and Martin has just arrived home from work. They sit at their cluttered kitchen table in a trailer home bursting with collectibles--photographs, stray dishes, the 18-volume Braille Bible.

She speaks of color as though she comprehends it: “My brother’s eyes are more hazel than they are brown.” “I guess somebody knows something we don’t--we’ve gotten more blue baby clothes than pink.”

But a brain tumor that damaged her optic nerve when she was 6 left her with no recollection of hazel, brown, blue or pink.

For two years, she lay in a coma in the downstairs bedroom of her grandmother’s Fullerton home. When she at last regained consciousness, LaNona--a onetime dancer and beauty pageant finalist--had to start from scratch in learning to walk and talk.

“Perhaps part of the reason I wanted a baby so badly was to relive the childhood that I missed,” she says.

This is the house where LaNona grew up.

“She went into convulsions right here on this floor,” says her mother’s mother, LouEllan Olson, nodding toward the middle of her living room.

A newly divorced mom with four small children, Jan Briley--then Jan Kennedy--moved her brood in with her parents. The Olsons had only one child, so they doted on the adorable youngsters.

Those were the days when “Nonie,” the second oldest, tap-danced and baton-twirled and rode her bicycle all over the neighborhood and taught her three brothers to roller-skate.

LaNona’s mother ran Miss Jan’s Modeling Agency in Anaheim, and her grandmother owned a beauty salon in Fullerton--so the two women were always trying to doll up their tomboy.

The little girl was as smart as she was athletic, says her grandmother, still boastfully: “She read 42 books in first grade.”

Olson fetches a professional photograph of Nonie, taken for the 1963 Little Miss America Contest at the Hollywood Bowl. Nonie danced her way to first runner-up in the competition.

The photo captures a beautiful, towheaded child with a dreamy expression on her face. Less than a month later, she suffered the violent seizure that marked a new era in hers and her family’s lives.

Doctors soon detected an inoperable malignant tumor in LaNona’s brain stem. The girl underwent radiation therapy, which destroyed the tumor but failed to rouse her from her coma. After a few months in the hospital, she was released to die at home.

There LaNona languished, eyes open in a vacant stare, mouth frozen in a crooked grin. Nurses kept watch over the tube-fed child. Family members took turns sitting by her side, talking to her as if she were awake.

On LaNona’s 7th birthday, her mother threw a party and invited the children with whom Nonie once played. For a group snapshot, Briley dressed up the comatose girl and scooped her fragile body out of bed.

The moment would become a painful memory. In the picture, the birthday girl is draped over her mother like a limp stick figure--her excruciatingly thin legs and arms dangling lifelessly.

“I realize now, in 20-20 hindsight, that I did this for me--not for Nonie,” Briley says. “Minutes after it was taken she went into a seizure and we had to call the paramedics. We almost lost her that day.”

Against all odds, LaNona gradually emerged from her coma. But its cause--a malignant tumor--left her partially paralyzed, deaf in one ear and blind. The tumor erased the memory of her sighted years, although she seemed to recognize the people who had coddled her throughout her unconsciousness.

Eventually, she recovered full movement with physical therapy. She learned to speak and read Braille.

LaNona is now a week overdue and her obstetrician, Karen Koe, has decided to induce labor soon. “Pick a day this week,” the doctor tells her patient.

LaNona’s blood pressure is too high for comfort--180 over 100. Still, she balks at her doctor’s orders--she had hoped for a natural childbirth.

“Let’s just go in and have it done, dear,” counsels Martin. After a bit more hemming and hawing, LaNona picks a Thursday.

“Is everything OK with the baby?” she asks Koe. Yes, answers the doctor. Then a few minutes later: “Is everything normal?” Yes, Koe reassures her.

When Koe reappears to schedule a hospital check-in time, LaNona murmurs to her husband, “Should we ask her about that thing I was worried about?”

Without waiting for his reply, she timidly broaches her inquiry: “Remember that I was paralyzed when I was a child? Will that have anything to do with whether I can have a normal delivery? Is there a chance that I won’t be able to push?”

It’s something fuzzy: hair. Something protruding: a nose. Something pliant: a mouth. Something curved: an ear.

Minutes old, Daniel Martin Hoke lies on his mother’s stomach, loudly complaining about his rude entrance into this strange environment. LaNona lightly touches him from head to foot.

“Oh, we did it. Oh, our baby,” she says. “What does he look like?”

“Half of you and half of me,” her husband answers. “Strawberry blond, big brown eyes.”

Daniel arrived weighing 7 pounds, 12 ounces and measuring 20 inches.

One instant, LaNona hears the baby crying. The next instant, she doesn’t. “They took the baby?” she asks.

“To clean him,” Martin explains.

A nurse soon returns the cozily swaddled baby and wheels mother and child to a room upstairs. “He’s staring at you,” says the nurse.

“He is? And he has big brown eyes?” LaNona queries. She silently rocks her baby.

Three generations of mothers gather in the room: Briley’s mother, LaNona’s and Martin’s mothers, Daniel’s mother.

After demonstrating the baby’s first bath to Briley--who will stay with the new parents until they get their bearings--a nurse helps LaNona breast-feed the child. LaNona gropes for Daniel’s face to feel his cheeks contract and expand.

A couple of days later, the extended family is on its way home. Martin and Briley pack the car while LaNona attempts to swaddle her child--for the first time without assistance.

Does the blanket go this way or that? Where is a corner? Oh, here. Is the baby in the middle of the blanket?

“I hope I can do this,” LaNona says, near tears.

Swaddling, nursing, diapering, bathing--intimidating tasks for any new parent, much less one who must learn them in darkness.

She cuddles what makes all those frustrations worthwhile for a mother. It’s something soft and tiny and wondrous.