Nurse, Patient Defy Odds to Become Mother, Son

She was the nurse who would always tend to the sickest child, the one who couldn’t walk or talk or breathe on his own. But something about the frail little boy in the corner crib scared her.

He had tubes in his throat and stomach. He had no stuffed animals, no toys, no visitors to his hospital room. Chrissy Nelson shied away from the 2-year-old until she was ordered to watch over him.

Then the young nurse at Gillette Children’s Hospital in St. Paul, Minn., leaned over the boy bundled in a white blanket and whispered: “I don’t know if you can hear me or not. But I’m going to take care of you.”

She thought it would be weeks. Months, at most. She began taking the boy out. To a Target store for red sneakers. To the zoo. To her home. Born premature and tiny enough to be cupped in a doctor’s hand, Stephen had cerebral palsy and so many ailments that no one expected him to live long.

But this weekend, Chrissy Nelson and Stephen will celebrate their 12th Mother’s Day together, a celebration of one woman’s devotion, one boy’s resilience and one enduring bond between mother and son.

“I just thought this boy needs a chance,” she says. “I wanted him to know that somebody really loved him. I feel like I’ve been his ride, his way, his pass through life.”

Becoming Stephen’s mother wasn’t easy.

The adoption process was long. The haggling over insurance was messy. The skeptics were vocal: Some thought a single woman shouldn’t adopt a disabled child. Others said a white woman wasn’t the right mother for a son of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux tribe.

“One nurse said, ‘You’re not the right color,’ ” Chrissy recalls. “Some people would say, ‘You’re the wrong culture.’ I said, ‘Why can’t I learn his culture and they accept me?’ ”

So Chrissy read history books about the Sioux. She learned to make Indian fry bread. She welcomed tribal members to Stephen’s hospital crib for prayers and stories about his ancestors.

Still, doubts remained, especially among some of Stephen’s family who wondered about a thirtysomething stranger eager to devote herself to a child who couldn’t walk or talk or breathe on his own.

Chrissy remembers an early conversation with Valerie Rondell, Stephen’s aunt:

“You’re a single girl, you have your whole life in front of you,” Valerie said. “Why do you want to do this?”

“I love this little boy,” Chrissy replied.

It was the right answer. Stephen desperately needed someone. His biological mother, Franny Rondell, had died months after his birth. His father disappeared after her death.

“We were praying for another to stand in his mother’s footsteps,” Valerie told Chrissy. “Maybe that’s you.”

Family Welcomes Her With Special Blessing

It was. On their first Mother’s Day together, in 1989, Chrissy was welcomed into Stephen’s family with a special blessing of the wind ceremony. A medicine man rubbed crushed tobacco on the foreheads of the new mother and son.

It wasn’t until a few years later, Chrissy says, that Stephen’s family told her the whole story about Franny’s death:

When Stephen was born, weighing only about 2 pounds, he had to remain hospitalized. After his mother left to visit family in South Dakota, he developed pneumonia. Doctors, unable to reach Franny, had to operate. They inserted tubes in his stomach and trachea.

When Franny returned, she was horrified to see Stephen that way. She ran. Weeks later, she was found dead with a note: “I have gone to join my son.”

According to Chrissy, Franny was following an Indian belief that when a hole is cut in your body without a blessing, your soul leaves.

Chrissy has told Stephen about his biological mother’s death. He has come to know his Indian relatives and has traveled with Chrissy to see her mother in Wisconsin.

How much Stephen absorbs isn’t clear. At age 13, he reads at a fifth-grade level. And though he can’t speak, he can convey words with signs. When he touches his cheek, then his heart, that means mother. When he clenches his fist and puts it in his chest, that means pain. And when he smiles, that means yes.

“Most of us would say Stephen cannot communicate,” says Kathleen Keenan, a friend who became acquainted with mother and son while working as a spokeswoman at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. “Chrissy has shown us all how a smile or a move of a finger can mean something.”

Chrissy would be first to admit her gift of gab more than makes up for Stephen’s silence. Valerie, his aunt, once joked that her Indian name should be “Chatterbox.”

But this wisecracking mother who once loved to scuba dive and ride her Harley has moments of loneliness too.

Once, at the grocery, Chrissy enviously watched a mother hush her noisy children. “I stopped and looked at her,” she says wistfully, “and thought if only one time . . . I would love to be able to hear my Stephen’s voice.”

Marriage Founders on Motherhood

And motherhood has meant choices. Chrissy married in 1991, and she and her husband formally adopted Stephen and settled in this Chicago suburb. But the couple later divorced, partly because of the pressures of rearing a child in a wheelchair who can end up hospitalized for six months at a stretch.

Stephen has endured enough medical crises to fill a textbook: pneumonia, underdeveloped lungs, an inflamed pancreas that shut down his liver, hip surgery that shifted his chest bone, making it seem as if he had suffered a heart attack.

“No wonder I have to use Clairol to get my gray out,” she jokes.

Chrissy says she had been told seven times that Stephen would not survive.

In 1997, when Stephen hovered near death, a hospice doctor asked him what he wanted. Using a makeshift computer that allowed him to press buttons to identify letters, he spent 16 hours wrestling to send his message:

M-O-M W-R-I-T S-T-O-R-I.

So she did. Last winter, Chrissy published “Eagle Doctor: Stories of Stephen, My Child With Special Needs.” She is now working on a second book.

Most parents fear their children will die before them. At age 45, Chrissy worries Stephen could outlive her; she wonders who would care for him, know him and love him as she has.

She regularly asks the doctor about Stephen’s long-term prognosis. “Every year,” she says, “he puts his hands up and says, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

When Stephen recently was ill, Chrissy didn’t know if he’d survive until Mother’s Day. She wrote a poem she will give to him this weekend.

It recalls her childhood, when Chrissy sat on her grandfather’s lap and the little farm girl fantasized about her perfect world.

She would be a wife and mother with six boys; they would all grow up happy and healthy and give her grandchildren.

It didn’t turn out that way. But Chrissy says her dreams have been realized.

“I wanted to have a child that I could hold in my arms and be able to watch them grow and show them the world,” she says. “I wanted to make a difference in someone’s life. . . . “

And she has.

Just peek in her closet. The tiny red sneakers are still there.

On the Net:

www.nelson-windwalker.com