Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  The Joke’s on Mom

  So a doctor says to new mother: “You look exhausted! It appears that you’re not getting enough sleep. If the baby starts to cry in the middle of the night, who gets up?” She says, “The whole neighborhood.”

  Tired of her son’s misbehavior, a mom takes the guilt trip route and says, “Every time you act up, I get another gray hair.” Without missing a beat, the son replies, “Then you must have been worse than me when you were young. Just look at Grandma!”

  More Spot the Moms!

  Catch the high-flying moms—if you can.

  They were pioneers speeding through the air or orbiting into space. Did they ever come down to earth to raise kids?

  1. Beryl Markham: First person to fly solo across the Atlantic from Britain to Canada

  Beryl Markham grew up in Kenya, where she was a successful horse trainer until a friend took her for a ride in his plane. She knew she had found her calling. Taking lessons, she became a commercial “bush” pilot, flying to remote areas in Kenya. In 1936, Markham wanted prize money, so she made the first solo flight across the Atlantic “the hard way”—from Britain to Canada and against the headwinds. The flight, and her book describing it, West with the Night, made the pilot world famous.

  Did the daring Markham ever dare to face the challenges of motherhood?

  2. Jacqueline Cochran: First female pilot to break the sound barrier

  Cochran, a beautician, had worked her way up from the rural South to the urban New York City. Once Jackie took flying lessons in 1932, she said so long to shampoo and hello to planes. Cochran began flying in competitions and won the Bendix transcontinental air race in 1938. During World War II she trained female pilots for the British and the U.S. governments, receiving a distinguished service medal for her efforts. Cochran then became the first female pilot to break the sound barrier. She set more aviation records for speed and altitude. At the time of her death in 1980 she held more records than any other pilot—male or female—in history.

  Did Jackie’s kids ever break the sound barrier watching TV?

  3. Valentina Tereshkova: First woman to fly in space and orbit the earth

  Valentina came up (way up!) the hard way. Born in the small Russian village of Maslennikovo, she worked in a factory and studied engineering. Valentina was chosen as one of five women to join the Soviet cosmonaut corps based on her amateur parachuting experience. In 1963, she took off on Vostok 6, becoming the first woman in space. Orbiting the earth 48 times, her flight lasted just under three days. That same year she also married fellow cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev.

  Did Valentina and Andrian become the first set of “spacey” cosmonaut parents?

  4. Dr. Sally Ride: First American woman in space

  At 27, Sally Kristen Ride’s four degrees, including a PhD in physics, seemed to propel her toward an academic career. Then she saw a newspaper ad placed by NASA calling for astronauts and, impulsively, she applied. Her impulse paid off and in 1983, Sally became the first U.S. woman in space when she orbited the earth in the space shuttle, Challenger. Sally found space work exhilarating. But back on the ground, she had to contend with reporters who asked her if she wept at work or needed a bra in space. (“There is no sag in zero-g” was Sally’s reply.) Post-NASA, Dr. Ride worked to encourage girls to enter scientific fields. She is a physics professor at the University of California at San Diego.

  Does Sally Ride have kids of her own that plan to be astronauts?

  Answers on page 301.

  Thanks, Son

  A man could never give his elderly mom the right birthday present.

  When he gave her a mansion, she said, “It’s too big. I don’t need so many rooms to clean. Thanks anyway.”

  When he gave her a new car she said, “I’m too old to be cavorting around, and I have my groceries delivered. Thanks anyway.”

  The man was in despair until he found the perfect gift. He knew his mother loved the Bible and her eye-sight was failing, so he gave her a parrot that could recite any Bible verse she wanted.

  His mother said, “At last you had the good sense to give a little thought to your gift. Thank you, thank you! The chicken was delicious.”

  The Age-Old Guessing Game

  Can moms predict whether they’ll have a boy or girl?

  Should the nursery be painted pink or blue? It’s an age-old question for moms-to-be. These days there are ultrasound sonograms to determine a baby’s sex with 95 percent accuracy. But ancient methods of foretelling whether baby will be a boy or a girl are still going strong.

  When researchers investigated old-fashioned methods to predict a baby’s gender, they made a surprising discovery. One method worked—mother’s intuition!

  PENDULUMS AND DRANO?

  Before technology stepped in, mothers relied on folk wisdom to determine whether the occupant in their womb was male or female. If the mother seemed to carry the baby high, the child would most likely be a boy; if the baby was carried low, a girl was predicted. When visible clues weren’t easy to spot, the pendulum prediction method was a popular standby. Mom-to-be, or a friend, would thread a string through a ring. The ring was dangled over the pregnant woman’s stomach. If it swung back and forth, the baby was a boy; if the pendulum moved in a circle—break out the pink paint!

  A popular urban legend claims that a mixture of Drano and the pregnant woman’s urine can reveal the sex of her baby-to-be. If it turns green, is it a boy? Does red mean a girl? What about brown? The truth is that mixing Drano and urine won’t tell you anything about an unborn baby at all. The only thing it will tell you, to paraphrase the great Ann Landers, is if your kidneys are working. Valuable knowledge? Yes. A predictor of boys and girls to come? No.

  TESTING THE TESTS

  When researchers from Johns Hopkins tested the accuracy of folk methods for determining a baby’s sex for 104 women, the methods were accurate about 55 percent of the time—the same as random guessing. But there was one puzzling finding. Women who relied on their own dreams and intuition predicted the baby’s sex with 71 percent accuracy.

  Did mothers possess special insight to help predict the sex of their baby? The question was studied by Dr. Shamas of the University of Arizona. One hundred women were asked to use just their intuition to predict whether they would give birth to a boy or a girl. Mothers predicted gender correctly over 70 percent of the time, well above random chance.

  But Mom can’t let her personal preferences get in the way. Dr. Shamas’s study also found that women who preferred one gender to the other had less successful intuitive abilities. “The point is that there’s a big difference between what you want to happen and what your intuition tells you is going to happen,” explained the doctor.

  Does this mean mothers can forget about sonograms? Well, maybe not, but researchers have agreed that mom’s surprising ability to predict the sex of her baby through intuition is a phenomenon worth serious study.

  Of course, kids knew that all along. When Dr. Shamas did a survey of college students, nearly 75 percent of them claimed that their mothers could read their thoughts and feelings in ways no one else could.

  Eskimo Mom Extraordinaire

  Ada Blackjack was alone on an Arctic island with few supplies and no wilderness skills. All she had was a determination to survive for the sake of her child.

  Ada Blackjack was Inuit, a full-blooded Eskimo who had never seen an igloo. Ada was a city mom who lived in Nome, Alaska, where she cleaned houses and took in sewing to make money. Like many aboriginal people from an urban environment, Ada never learned the survival skills of her people. She certainly had no idea how to live in the Arctic without modern conveniences.

  At 23, Ada had known hard times. She’d had three children with her first husband and had lost two of them. Only six-year-old Bennett had survived, but the boy had fallen ill with tuberculosis. Ada was desperate to get her boy good medical care, only she couldn’t afford it—until it seemed she got a lucky break.

 
; ESKIMO WANTED

  In 1921, an expedition of four young men came to Nome to hire Eskimos to help them live off the land. They intended to camp on the Arctic island of Wrangel and interest the United States or Canada in its development. No Eskimo wanted to go to Wrangel, which was then controlled by Russia. Located north of Siberia, it was desolate, barren, and locked in ice floes much of the year.

  But Ada needed money, and the expedition needed a seamstress to repair and sew warm clothing from animal skins. Leaving Bennett in a children’s home, Ada went to Wrangel Island to make some money.

  EXPEDITION TO TRAGEDY

  Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefánsson organized the expedition. He lectured that the Arctic was a friendly place and as bountiful a piece of real estate as Hawaii. Stefánsson’s four recruits carried enough supplies for six months. After that they’d have to live off Arctic “bounty.”

  But when the expedition landed on Wrangel, they found no paradise. Isolated, bleak, and frozen—so much colder than Nome—Ada could barely tolerate it. Unlike the young men who believed in the importance of polar exploration, Ada was simply terrified, especially of the polar bears that roamed the island. Her biggest fear was that she’d never survive to see Bennett again.

  GETTING BACK TO BENNETT

  By the following summer the crew was desperately watching for a promised supply ship that never came. By winter their food was nearly gone and one of the men, Lorne Knight, had scurvy. Ada was left to care for Knight and the camp’s cat, Vic, while the rest of the crew left with a dog team to find help. None of them was ever seen again.

  Ada was malnourished, so she forced herself to learn new skills to survive. She learned to trap foxes and hunt birds and seals. Petite Ada invented a contraption to protect herself from the ricochet of a rifle so she wouldn’t be knocked off her feet. She even managed to fend off the polar bears. She was determined to survive and return to Bennett.

  Though Ada kept Knight warm and fed, he died in the spring. Now absolutely alone, Ada nearly despaired, and only thoughts of Bennett kept her going. When a rescue ship finally arrived, Ada had spent nearly two years in the Arctic and the last six months alone—except for the company of Vic the cat.

  THE DISAPPEARING HEROINE

  When Ada returned to civilization, she immediately took Bennett to Seattle for treatment. His health remained fragile and Ada’s life remained difficult. She wanted to forget the horrors of Wrangel, but the press chased after her, demanding explanations for the disaster. When Ada wouldn’t talk, wild stories circulated about her. Some portrayed her as a heroine; other accounts blamed her for Knight’s death.

  Ada married for the second time and had another son, Billy. This marriage didn’t last, and the two divorced. Money from the expedition ran out, and there were battles with illness and poverty. She took her sons to Nome where she finally turned her luck around. She herded reindeer and used the hunting and trapping skills learned on Wrangel to feed her family.

  ADA’S TRIUMPH

  Bennett lived to be 56 and remained close to his mother all his life. So did her younger son, who became a leader of Alaska’s native population. Billy understood the historic importance of Ada’s ordeal, and he helped best-selling author Jennifer Nivens write Ada’s story, in the book Ada Blackjack. When his mother died, Billy proudly put a plaque on her grave that reads simply, “The Heroine of Wrangel Island.”

  Mom Gets MADD

  Candy Lightner didn’t get even. She got MADD.

  On an evening in May 1980, Candy Lightner was an average mother of three, driving her 13-year-old daughter, Cari, to a friend’s house for a sleepover. When Cari opened the car door to leave, her mother suddenly was overwhelmed by the need to say, “Cari, you know I love you?”

  “Oh, Mother, don’t be so mushy,” Cari replied. The ordinary evening probably would have been forgotten if it hadn’t been the last time Candy ever saw her daughter alive. The following day, Lightner came home from shopping with a friend and learned that Cari was dead. Walking along a quiet street on her way to a church carnival in Fair Oaks, California, Cari was hit from behind. A drunken driver rammed her with his car, sending her flying 125 feet, with a force that knocked her out of her shoes and killed her. He never bothered to stop.

  FROM SORROW TO RAGE

  A few days later, Candy learned from the California Highway Patrol officers investigating the incident that the driver who ran down her daughter had several prior drunk-driving convictions, but that considering the way the system worked, she’d be lucky if the driver did any jail time. He wound up spending 16 months behind bars, but Lightner’s sorrow fueled a new and consuming rage. If drunk driving maimed and killed people, then why didn’t law enforcement take drunk driving more seriously?

  Somehow Lightner made it through the funeral. Even while coping with unbearable loss while comforting her other children (Cari’s twin sister, Serena, and her younger brother, Todd) the shell-shocked mother knew that she wanted to make something positive come out of Cari’s death.

  GETTING MADD

  Lightner’s friends were as enraged about Cari’s death as she was and encouraged Lightner to take action. They supported her idea to found an organization to raise awareness of the deadly problems caused by drunk drivers and the relaxed penalties for those who were caught under the influence. One of her friends suggested a name: Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, which came to be better known by the acronym MADD.

  At the time of Cari’s death, Lightner was a divorced Sacramento real estate agent and focused on raising her kids. She had no idea how to launch political reform and no political connections to make her voice heard. But, supported by her friends and motivated by her anger over Cari’s death, Lightner became an activist. She read books, did research, and consulted every possible ally she could think of. She eventually quit her job to begin a life of phone calls, meetings, and letter writing. Still wracked by crying jags, she forced herself to speak publicly, and calmly, about the daughter she missed so desperately. Otherwise she might be dismissed as an overwrought mother, too emotional to understand legal issues.

  Candy stuck to her tactic with the first speech she wrote and delivered on her own at a traffic safety conference in Oregon. She began with a description of Cari and the details of her death. She was so clear-eyed and calm that when she told the audience that Cari was “my little girl,” the crowd gasped in shock and the media went into a feeding frenzy. Soon MADD was national news. And so was MADD’s founder, who appeared around the country as a keynote speaker, gave interviews for radio and television, and testified before Congress. Soon the victims of drunk drivers had a representative with a human face—the pretty, freckled face of Cari Lightner.

  MADD SUCCESS

  From 1980 to 1985, MADD went from a local crusade to a national organization with three million members and chapters in all 50 states. MADD eventually spread to the international community, with 600 chapters worldwide. During Lightner’s tenure as head of MADD, alcohol-related accidents declined 14 percent and the legal drinking age was pushed from 18 to 21 in many states, saving an estimated 800 lives a year. In 1980, Cari was one of 25,000 people killed by drunk drivers. By 1992 the number was down to 17,000. Thanks to Lightner’s work, Americans must have lost their tolerance for drunk drivers; from 1980 to 1994 the numbers of intoxicated drivers dropped by over 30 percent.

  All this success came at a price. As MADD grew and grew, Lightner took on the executive tasks of running an organization with dozens of paid employees and hundreds of volunteers. With these responsibilities and commitments, Lightner feared she was neglecting her children. In 1985 Lightner resigned from MADD. She took the time to deal with personal issues and to coauthor a book, Giving Sorrow Words, to help those who mourned the loss of a loved one. But her legacy continues; MADD, which changed its name in 1984 to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, still helps victims of drunk drivers, monitors the courts, and works to pass stronger anti-drunk-driving laws.

  Arrangement in Gray a
nd Black No. 1

  Otherwise known as Whistler’s mother, Anna McNeil Whistler has become one of the most famous women in the world because of a tardy artist’s model. The story goes that in 1871, American painter James Whistler had arranged for a model to come to his London studio to pose for him. When she failed to show, Whistler asked his mother Anna, who was living with him, to pose instead. The painting became one of the most famous images in the world. Whistler called his mother’s portrait Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother, but it is better known today as Whistler’s Mother.

  The painting helped establish Whistler’s credentials as a serious artist when the French government bought it in 1891, an event that unfortunately Anna didn’t live to see. The painting was eventually hung in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay, a great honor accorded to few American artists.