David's Sister

On these blogs I’ve written a lot about my son David but very little about his sister, Martha. August 15 was her birthday, so it is an appropriate time to write about her. Of my three children, she has had the most adventuresome life. 

Martha was the middle child.  Like other middle children, she received less attention than either her older brother, Karl, or David, the baby.  I named her Martha after Martha in the Bible, the one who took care of the household chores while her sister Mary sat talking to Jesus.  “Martha” means “worker” and my daughter has worked hard at everything she has done. 

Martha notices things.  She was almost eight years old when David was born.  In the car going home from the hospital I cautioned her, “He’s a newborn baby.  He can’t do anything yet.”

“Yes, he can,” big sister insisted.  “He blinked his eyes.  He made a fist.  He moved his legs.”

Following David’s birth I dropped into a deep Depression.  My little girl helped care for her baby brother and, all too often, made supper and washed dishes. 

Martha was a teenager when I went back to work.  My daughter said, “In movies Martha is never the heroine.  Martha is always the name of the maid.  My mother has a live-in maid.  It’s me.”

Martha was only 16 when she graduated from high school.  Two weeks later she left for Norway as an exchange student.  She loved Norway and the Norwegians, especially the family with whom she lived for over a year. 

After her year abroad, Martha came home to enroll in St. Olaf College in Minnesota, founded by Norwegian Lutherans.  For her junior year of college she returned to Norway.  In Oslo she could not get the courses she needed to complete her degree in math.  The next year she graduated from St. Olaf with a major in Norwegian! 

Since the business world has no demand for experts in Norwegian, she worked as a secretary while going to the University of Illinois at Chicago and earning a Master’s Degree in Teaching English as a Second Language.  She taught a class for a group of old people, first generation Americans who had grown up speaking only English and wanted to learn some phrases in Norwegian before going to visit the home of their ancestors. 

Martha took full-time job as a secretary and went back to school.  She earned a master’s degree from the University of Illinois in Chicago in Teaching English as a Second Language.  She taught part-time in a small college; her class included students who spoke many languages, including Chinese and Vietnamese. 

While working in Chicago, Martha met a fellow named Don Schumann.  They dated for over a year, then broke up because Don did not want to get married. 

Martha went in the Peace Corps.  She spent over two years in Thailand, teaching English in a Thai college in Yala in the far south of the country.  She loved Thailand almost as much as she loved Norway. 

When Martha came back to the U.S., Don met her plane.  They were married a year later.

This blog is too long.  Next time I will tell about Martha as a wife, a homemaker, and as a working mother.