Mother Courage

Not every mother is called upon to sell her last bit of jewelry to save her starving child in a war zone; there are countless ways of showing motherly steel. Here, four grown children tell TRIN YARBOROUGH their stories.

LOU RAWLS

South-Central Los Angeles

One morning when I was 14, living in the little Louisiana town of Mansfield, two white policemen came knocking on our front door to arrest me. Two teen friends of mine had been picked up for breaking into a little store and taking gum and cigarettes and they named several others as having helped them.

Well, my father was away but my mother, Ellen Rawls, called me into the house and said, “Did you do it?” And I said no, that I didn’t know anything about it, which I didn’t. The police took me in anyway and I was scared to death, but my mother never doubted me.

It was scary for a black mom during that time to face the white cops. Some were nice, but some were very rough. These were segregation days, and blacks could only go so far. My mother knew she had to act quick, because the police had a record of beating up black kids once they got them down in the jail--that’s how come those two boys had named other kids in the burglary.

I was in jail only four hours. Mother was afraid, but she would have jumped off a cliff for her kids. She went right over to the burglarized place and found a witness--an old lady who’d been watching from her screened porch and saw the first two guys do the break-in alone. My mom took this lady down to the jail and got the police to let me go.

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GEORGE CHACON

Mar Vista

I sat at our dining room table pretending to do my homework, but I was so afraid I couldn’t concentrate. I was 18 and had just given my mother, Elba Chacon, a three-page letter in which I told her for the first time that I was gay. She was reading it in the adjoining room.

She came here as an adult from a strict society, Costa Rica, and was also a pretty devout Catholic. Finally she called me in. She seemed shaken, but as if a longtime fear of hers had been confirmed. I’d heard many horror stories about parents disowning their children when they learned they were gay, and I was afraid I might even be thrown out of the house. She stayed calm but asked to be left alone awhile. I felt frightened and worried, but for the next three weeks she was still very affectionate to me although a little aloof. Finally she told me that although she wasn’t really proud of the fact I was gay, she loved me very much, just as she always had. She reminded me of a letter she’d sent me at camp a few years earlier, urging me to always be proud of who I was, and she said she wasn’t backing down from that.

I’m very fortunate to have a mother like her, able to accept and love me [despite her upbringing]. We had always been close--I talked with her about so many things--but my guilt at hiding part of my life was beginning to ruin our relationship. It would have been a tragedy for both of us if I couldn’t have told her, or if she couldn’t have accepted it. In the l0 years since then, she’s met many of my boyfriends and helped me with all kinds of problems.

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SOKKUN KIMPAU

Long Beach

My mother, my four brothers and I had been working three years in the Cambodian fields where we had been sent by the Khmer Rouge. I was 11. All of us were dying from starvation and disease. The Khmer Rouge had long since killed my father, and my mother had long since used up for barter the bits of jewelry she had hidden when we were all evacuated from Phnom Penh.

The only thing she had left was the ring our father had given her when they first married. She could not bear to part with it, and all this time had kept it secretly sewed into a blouse collar. But at last one day she traded it for 10 cups of rice to keep us alive. If she had been caught she would have been killed.

My mom, Yokeng Li Kimpau , is a very unusual woman, especially for a Cambodian. She made the decision that we would try to escape through the jungle to a Thai refugee camp and then to try to get to the United States. I was 13 when we arrived here in 1980. She allowed me to go to school, to pursue my dream to become a doctor. This was very untypical for a Cambodian mom, because the tradition is that women should marry, stay home and raise a family.

At first she worried that becoming a doctor might be too hard for me since I couldn’t speak English and we had no money at all when we arrived. But she realized that I could study very hard and that if the whole family pulled together I could achieve this dream.

Many times I would study at the medical library until midnight and when I came home, often feeling discouraged, she was always waiting up for me with a Cambodian dinner.

We were very poor then. All my family were working in a doughnut shop. My mother would get up at 5 a.m. and not get home until 7 p.m. Yet she would tell me I mustn’t worry, that she would work extra to make sure I had the tuition money for school. All my four brothers also sacrificed greatly so I would only have to work part-time, not full-time, to get through school.

In 1993 I graduated from UCLA Medical School and am now in my third and final year of residency at Long Beach Memorial Hospital.

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DOUG KELLY

South Pasadena

Our dad left my mother, Edith Kelly, before I was born, so she raised my sister and me all alone. Mom was half Cherokee Indian--later she became a big Indian rights activist. Her own mom died when she was 5. She grew up keeping house for her dad and brothers. She even shot rattlesnakes for extra money. She never went to school, but she learned on her own to read and passed a beauty school test.

We were very poor but didn’t know it. One Thanksgiving she made a school costume for my sister using an oatmeal box for a papoose carrier. Our Thanksgiving dinner that year was nothing but bowls of oatmeal, but Mom made it festive by adding autumn leaves to the table and we thought it was great.

When I was studying for the test to become a Hollywood makeup artist, I’d practice on her and my sister, making them up to look Chinese or black or like they had broken noses and bruises.

When I was a teen my mom bought me an old car, but soon after, another car wrecked it. I came home crying and hysterical, and she said: “You weren’t hurt, and as for the car, it’s only tin and paint.” That became a family saying. When I won my first Emmy award for makeup, I took it straight to her and told her: “Here’s some tin and paint!”