Mom (7 page)

At her service we asked everybody to wear red shoes, but we didn’t really explain why. Mom would wear red shoes to chemotherapy, and she’d tell everybody there that you couldn’t have a bad day if you were wearing red shoes. So I got up and I said that everybody was wearing red shoes because Mom believed that you couldn’t have a bad day when you were wearing red shoes. I had on a pair of red high heels, and I’m wearing red clogs today.

Danielle:
I like the idea of going out on December 5 and putting on red shoes and just celebrating.

Gabrielle:
We’re going to use days like Thanksgiving and days where we wear red shoes to remember her. She lived life so fully, and we can’t ever forget to do that.

DANIELLE HALL (
left
) AND GABRIELLE HALL (
right
)

Fanni Victoria Green-Lemons:
When I was your age, my mother and I had to negotiate about letting go. She and my dad had raised us to be fiercely independent, magnanimously hopeful, and well grounded—with common sense and a wonderful sense of the presence of the Lord in our lives. But actually providing opportunities for us to go out into the world and be those things was scary for her, I think, and so we had bouts and battles and skirmishes. For such a long period of time, my mother and I seemed to communicate across a great divide of misunderstanding, and I want so much not to have that with you.

Danyealah Green-Lemons:
We always talk about your relationship with Nana, and I think my relationship with you is
a lot
different. We talk about things, and I come to you when I need help or when I need to talk. I keep learning from you every single day—simple things, like how to be a strong and independent woman, how to live life, and how to treat people—that’s a big one because you treat people wonderfully and you give
so much
.You keep in touch with people. I’m definitely learning from you how to maintain relationships.

When I see you with Nana, I’m always observing how you communicate with her: your body language and what you say and how you say it to her. When she talks, I see that you are listening but that you are also analyzing what she’s saying, so that when you say something, it will make sense to her even though she might not agree with you.

Fanni:
When she got older, my mom was so very feisty about her level of care. She would not let us—her daughters—help her, and I was angry. I thought she raised us to do exactly that, and she wouldn’t let us do it. I was afraid that we weren’t going to be able to be of help to her until she got to the place where it was clear that she wasn’t going to be able to help he rself.

I will never forget asking my mom to see assisted-living facilities. She would say she would go one day, and then she wouldn’t go the next. We just didn’t know what was going to happen. And so I called the mother of my best friend, and I said, “What do I do?” And she said, “Fanni, mothers can never resist their children when their children simply bare their hearts. So don’t go in and try to be strong for your mom. Don’t go in and try to make her
do
anything. Just look your mom in the eye and tell her you need her help in order for you to help her.” So I did. And my mom looked back at me and said, “I will go. Although I’m
so
scared, I will go.” And I put my head in her lap, and I cried. But she didn’t. She put her hand under her chin like she does, and she just looked off to the side. Then when I got done crying, she said, “Well, we’d better go do this before I change my mind.”

What I want to say to you is that sometimes life catches you by surprise and you feel unequipped to handle what it brings you, but every bit of life you’ve lived before that moment equips you to live through it. That’s what I would give to you.

Pam Pisner:
Dad and I had known each other for five years before we got married, and then it was actually eight years before you were born. We talked about having children because we thought it would be really cool to see the product of the two of us. We were such a good team together, and we just wanted to know what it would be like to make some babies.

Shira Pisner:
How did the product come out?

Pam:
Beautiful. We love the product. It was a little bit more of a product than we originally planned on. [
laughs
] But it was good.

Dan Pisner:
We thought that we most likely wouldn’t have children—

Pam:
Well, we were afraid, because I had such a difficult time conceiving—and that was pretty devastating. I think we started trying seriously maybe two or three years after we got married. And then it was a few years before we decided to take Pergonal, which is the fertility drug that I took to get pregnant. It was something that we had said we would never do.

There were a lot of risks—not just the large chance of multiple births, but there were other risks, too. We said we wouldn’t go that far, but when it got down to
Okay, if we want to have children, we’ve got to do this,
we decided that we wanted them bad enough that we were going to give it a try.

Dan:
Mom-Mom, Pam’s grandma, prayed and prayed that Pam would get pregnant—she thinks she may have prayed too hard.

Pam:
If we ever write a book, that’s going to be the title:
I Think I Prayed Too Hard.

Of course when I first found out I was pregnant, we were elated—we couldn’t believe it. It actually happened on the second round of Pergonal, which was good for a number of reasons. One is, it happened. Also, Pergonal is very expensive and not covered by insurance.

One of the first things we did was buy a little Nissan Stanza, because it would be a family car and with the hatch-back, we’d be able to put the stroller in the back and carry all the little things we’d need for our little baby.

Dan:
We got delivery of the Nissan Stanza about a week before Mom went in and got the sonogram. After that, the Stanza was worthless.

Pam:
At eleven weeks, I had gone in for a sonogram at the radiologist’s office—Dad was in the waiting room. The first radiologist came, did the ultrasound, and then walked away. Then another person came in with him, and they sort of talked to each other and they left . . . and then a
third
person. I was trying to ask what was going on, but they weren’t saying anything. So I started to get a little nervous, and probably by the fourth or the fifth person, I wanted them to let Dad come in, but they weren’t letting him. I saw them pointing to the screen like they were counting to five. So finally, Dan, you came back, and I went, “It’s a litter.”

And you said, “What are you talking about?”

And I said, “There are five babies.”

Dan:
I said, “What are you
talking
about?”

Pam:
They wouldn’t tell us anything; they needed to have the doctor tell us. So we went back to Dr. Grodin’s office, and he was a well-known fertility specialist. He had an office with this huge desk that was up high, and you sat down low in these little chairs. So you feel little and he’s
big.

Dan:
It was like being before God.

Pam:
So we went in, and we’re sitting in those little chairs and a few minutes later he walks in and he’s looking a little green around the gills. I just looked up and went, “It’s five babies, isn’t it?” He just shook his head, because he’d been teasing us all along that the largest multiples that he’d had in his practice was triplets—just one set of triplets. Everyone else had been twins.

Dan:
Back when you guys were conceived there was nothing called selective reduction; it just wasn’t practiced at all. And so when Dr. Grodin said, “We see at least five embryos,” his question to us was whether or not you want to have five kids.

Pam:
The options were all or nothing.

Dan:
You’ve got to understand, we had two weeks to decide, and our questions were: number one,
How dangerous is it for Mom to carry five babies?
and number two,
What were the chances of even having one viable baby? What are the chances they could all be very unhealthy? Either they don’t survive or they’re very unhealthy all their lives?
So we thought about all of that in those two weeks.

Pam
: I think we were extremely apprehensive because it was such a high-risk pregnancy. I mean, we knew you were going to be premature, but we didn’t know how premature. So it was very scary. We thought,
What are we going to do with five babies?
One is hard enough, especially never having done this before. And you can’t exactly go to your next-door neighbors for advice.

Dan:
Yeah, “When you had
your
quintuplets, what’d
you
do?”

Pam:
And even people with twins—it’s a totally different thing. But we agreed that we were a good team, and we have a strong, solid relationship. Having a baby puts a strain on a relationship, and having multiple babies puts more of a strain on a relationship. We knew ours was strong and together we could do it.

We went to see Bubbe and Pop-Pop, my mom and dad. We were just coming from the doctor’s office. I mean, I was terrified; I was in tears.They tried to soothe us, but they were upset and worried like we were. And then we went to see Grandma and Pop-Pop, Dad’s mom and dad, whose reaction was, “Oh, wow! One baby is a joy—so this is five times the joy!”

So we went back to Dr. Grodin, and I think he saw that we were leaning toward continuing the pregnancy. He said if anybody could do it, I could: I had everything going for me that could be going for me.We learned much later on that the other doctors in his practice pulled him aside and told him he was out of his mind—that he should have just told us right off the bat that we should have aborted the whole pregnancy—

Dan:
Because they knew this is a high, high, high, high risk. At that time, I think there were eight recorded sets of quintuplets
ever
that survived.

Pam:
We didn’t come home all at once with five babies. After you were born we’d been told by the hospital that we’d have a staggered homecoming because you were different weights and had different health issues that needed to be overcome before you would be able to go home from the hospital. As it turned out, we got two babies home on July 28 and two more babies on July 29. Then Elliot stayed an additional five weeks.

Dan:
When everybody was home and nobody was sleeping through the night yet, two of you guys were on one feeding schedule, and two others were on another feeding schedule—because we got two one day, two the next day. And then Elliot, five weeks later, he was on the third feeding schedule. If you do the math, we were feeding babies twenty-one out of twenty-four hours a day. And we didn’t want to bottle-prop because we thought it was very important to hold each and every one of you, each time you were being fed. That meant we never,
ever
slept.

Pam:
And then Dad stayed home from work for the first year.

Dan:
Mom had been working at the Food and Drug Administration since she was seventeen years old, and she had a good career. She was making more money than I was, and we figured it made sense that I’d stay home. So that’s why Mom went back to work and I stayed home for the first year. But I had huge amounts of help because Bubbe had set up a volunteer group. Anyone who said they were willing to come by and feed, she’d schedule them: “You’ll be here Wednesdays at two o’clock to four o’clock and feed these babies.” She had it all scheduled.