Happy Mother's Day, Shit My Mother Says ... the Back-Story/Black-Story

Formally addressed as Dr. Nevenka T. Kevich M.D.

Casually known as Nena.

I call her mom or mama or throughout the years, several other names ... but we shan't go into that.

For the past few weeks I've been posting tales on LRNtoday of "Shit my mother says". I'm doing so because I've taken on the role of caregiver to my eighty-four year old mother who's been burdened by a bout with leukemia.

In the "Age of Corona", I've been socially distancing myself ... with her ... in Wisconsin. Hence the need for some comic relief.

In all fairness, I must give her props and let you know who my mother is a bit better as I've gotten to know her better myself these past few months. Bear in mind, this is not, by any means, a full biography.

Nevenka was born in the summer of 1935 in a hilly region of Croatia called Lika Udbina. At the onset of World War II, she, her mother, and sister escaped Croatia to Belgrade on a train that her father was conducting. Serbians and Croatians were like Jews and Germans at the time. The geo-political rams of this can be easily googled but hardly explained... my mother is Serb.

She got through the wartime bombings with few physical scars whilst the mental and emotional ones were firmly imbedded. Nevertheless, she entered medical school and became an anesthesiologists.

She came to the states in 1962 per request of her sister, my aunt, who is also an anesthesiologists. She met my father a couple of years later and popped my sister out in 1968 and me in '69,

My father was a Russian Orthodox priest (yes, they can have kids) and artist but my mother was the bread-winner. Well, the bread-winner during the day and then the dutiful housewife/mother in the evenings. Obviously this created gaps that could never possibly be filled however much she tried.

Nena is a no-nonsense kind of person. A trait that is surely observed within the first few minutes of meeting her. "Sugar coating is for cakes" should be her motto.

With what some have perceived as an abrasive and cold nature lives a wholly kind and warm human being. Her bedside manner was well received by many, albeit at a cost to her family (which she knows and laments over).

She worked as an anesthesiologists for over thirty years and never lost a patient on her table. Quite an impressive feat to be sure but there are other things that I've learned about her that surprised me and then found quite predictable and sound.

For instance, she insisted on having someone black in the room when the patient was black...

"Really?" I asked.

"Of course ilia. Come on. They are scared (like most people are) and are about to have surgery. They can't just see white people with masks on over them. It was the sixties, you don't know what that was. My best techs were black, except for Nancy ... she was white. If I ever had a black child on my table, I wouldn't perform the surgery if I didn't have a black tech with me."

...Shit my mother says

Happy Mother's Day Dr. Nevenka T. Kevich i.e. mom

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