Triumph Over Trauma

                                     Preface: A Mother’s Story

            On a Saturday morning at 12:49 A.M. in early December, when most of the city was asleep, a little girl was born in San Diego, California.  What should have been a normal delivery became a nightmare of blurred faces and hushed voices that whispered fears of uncertainty about the future of the pale infant.  She had swallowed her meconium inside her mother’s womb as she frantically struggled to be born.  On her father’s audiotape, her muffled cry rang out—and then silence, as precious pre-birth seconds slipped by.  At birth, she was rated in as a “1” on the doctor’s “Apgar” scale.  Zero is the score for a dead baby.

            As a result of this harrowing birth, the baby suffered some loss of oxygen, and doctors told her mother to prepare for a possible life of difficulty.  The mother, desperate to help her child succeed, resolved not to go back to work, but to devote her full time to stimulating the baby physically, intellectually, and neurologically, and to create an enhanced learning environment to further stimulate the learning pathways in the child’s brain that communicate and process information. 

So began a search for the most effective ways to help her child which culminated in an intensive program performed by the mom in short durations throughout the day, seven days a week, for thirteen years, consisting of supplying the little girl with factual information, words and phrases on art, biography, science, music, history, colors, math, foreign languages, literature, and carrying out an enhanced physical program.

 To the doctors’ amazement, the child, after being exposed to countless hours of stimulation, beat the odds stacked against her by going on to read independently at the second to third grade level by age three, joined MENSA as a child (an international society that requires its members to score at least at the 98^th percentile on one of the standardized intelligence tests), entered a two year college by age thirteen with a emphasis in science and mathematics, won local, state, and/or national competitions in violin, classical voice, art and science; wrote short stories, poetry, and music scores; scored high on the SAT, became a National Merit Scholar, and received an Essence Award in 1999.