Oct. 14, 2011: Eastern Wake ignored in school politics

This originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Cross the Neuse River anywhere east of Raleigh in Wake County, and you've entered the land of the ignored when it comes to school-board politics.

While leaders and residents of all stripes in the rest of the county argued for two years over "neighborhood schools" and what that might mean for poverty rates in downtown Raleigh schools - culminating in the school board chairman's loss in the election Tuesday - the nearly neighborhood schools in Eastern Wake just quietly got poorer. 

"Hodge Road Elementary was 70 percent poor under the old board, and 70 percent under the new one," says Shannon Hardy, a Knightdale mother of two and teacher at Exploris Charter School. "School assignment is not the solution."

If you've heard any Eastern Wake murmurs at all, it's likely because of Hardy and the rest of the Knightdale 100. This parent-advocate group, birthed in 2009 by Knightdale Mayor Russell Killen, isn't caught up in the partisanship that pervaded Tuesday's vote. Members can barely tell you, in fact, which school board representative covers what part of the town now that Knightdale has been split among three districts. 

No amount of school choice, which the assignment model now on the table touts, is going to change the reality that well more than 50 percent of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches in all but two of the schools in the historically rural area. In such a large swath of the county, only a diversity of housing can alter that number.

So rather than focus on politics and percentages, the Knightdale 100 have their sights on programs and perceptions.

"We realized my child's success relies on the success of all the children," Hardy says. "If you have money, you just buy a house in a rich neighborhood, but if you're just hard-working middle-class or single parents, your child's success in the classroom depends on all the other kids in the classroom."

What the group seeks are higher expectations for poorer students from parents and teachers. High-quality teaching, the members say, is what leads to student achievement.

Opting out of schools

They also want - and have snared - new programs they hope will attract families and keep the town's higher-achieving students from opting out. Two years ago, 400 Knightdale-area high schoolers were in private, charter or magnet schools.

"So many times we're focused on low-performing kids, and getting them up to level is important, but you can't do that to the exclusion of high-performing students," Killen says, adding that new Wake schools Superintendent Tony Tata completely gets that.

"Tata has done more and given more attention to this issue since he's been here than anybody the entire time I've been working on this, for at least seven or eight years," Killen says. "He sees it, and he wants to make it better."

The program equity that the group seeks would include more AP classes at Knightdale High - and some acknowledgment that Hodge Road Elementary needs help.

"Why is Spanish being taught to students in Cary, but the non-Spanish-speaking students at Hodge Road Elementary, which is more than 50 percent Hispanic, don't get any Spanish lessons?" Hardy asks. "Why isn't this a bilingual school?"

Plans killed by economy

Before a bypass opened in 2005, a continuously clogged U.S. 64 hindered higher-end development in Eastern Wake. The bypass brought bigger subdivisions to the drawing board - several, unfortunately, stayed there when the economy went bust.

The planned Wendell Falls, with its 4,000 houses on 1,400 acres, even had its own exit off the bypass. Those houses would have finally helped naturally diversify a town where 75 percent of the housing is considered affordable. The project is in bankruptcy. 

In Knightdale, the Langston Ridge development sits off Hodge Road with its roads paved and its street lights on, illuminating acres of weeds and trash, but not one house.

 More than 200 homes costing in the $200,000s to $400,000s were planned. 

"Until we have more high-end housing, you just can't assign around that," says Killen, who decided that the only answer in the meantime was to find parents willing to improve the schools, which routinely have some of the county's lowest test scores, a priority. 

Robin Woodlief, who grew up in Wendell and has two children in Eastern Wake schools, is one of several passionate parents who attended early organizational meetings and answered the call.

"The demographics are what they are," she says. "I think in the past there's been a mentality if you were poor, you weren't smart and you couldn't do the work. 

"It takes awhile to get over that and convince the kids as well as the parents that just because you don't have any money doesn't mean you don't have a brain up there."

One way the Knightdale 100 are trying to reach the area's parents is with forums; for instance, one this year touted the importance of taking algebra in eighth grade and another explained how best to measure teacher performance.

"I think that our parents in Knightdale want to do the hard work as parents, they just don't know how," Hardy says. "Further, our teachers are well-intentioned, but they under-challenge our children. It is hard for a teacher to know how hard to push when the parents have not gone to college or don't naturally push the child themselves."

An area at a crossroads

It's clear that Eastern Wake County is at a crossroads. Although there are always exceptions, Tim Simmons of the Wake Education Partnership says research shows that 60 percent poor is the point at which a school starts losing families with the means to leave. 

East Wake Academy, a charter school in Zebulon, already has 1,100 students and 600 waiting to get in.

Without more higher-end housing in Eastern Wake, the regular schools will keep edging closer to tipping. And the self-perpetuating cycle is that the poorer the schools become, the less likely that developers will build near them.

"The geography of Eastern Wake and the economy have not been kind," Simmons says. 

"You can roll over or you can do whatever is possible to get those schools into a position of being a viable option. If you can attract one group, then you can attract another."

If the Knightdale 100 can hold the line - and even improve school quality - until the economy improves, development will take care of itself, he says, citing the Northern Virginia schools that are good only because people moved there to be close to D.C., and demanded better schools.

"It's really common for parent groups to get involved because kids can't get into AP classes or whatever, and once they accomplish that, they're done," Simmons says. "This group, it's pretty clear they are in it for the long haul."

Yes, they are. And that's partly because they love the area's diversity and the small-town feel that still permeates the ball fields and restaurants. 

"Around here, we always have the most diverse soccer team, the most diverse summer swim teams. That's Americana, the spirit of America, pluralism," Hardy says. "You don't ask what you can do for your kid. You ask what you can do for your school system, what you can do to support your neighbor's kid in their bad times."

During the school assignment debate, many people said they were willing to spend more on better teachers and programs at schools that started struggling. Your Eastern Wake neighbors have been struggling for a while now. 

Maybe we should help the Knightdale 100 stabilize a teetering quarter of the county until the housing market stirs again. If we let these schools languish, development is far less likely to arrive.

So far, the Knightdale 100 have been paying for their progress mostly from their own pockets, although Woodlief is working to get the group nonprofit status. 

She doesn't want to think about how much money - not to mention hours - she has given to the cause.

"If we can turn it around and get good things to happen, it's worth it," she says. "My parents always told me you can preach to your children all day long, but unless they see you do it, it doesn't mean anything. 

"I'm teaching my children that if they get involved in the community, they can make a difference."

Next week: The group's accomplishments - including STEM schools in Eastern Wake - and praise.

bwheeler@newsobserver.com or 929-829-4825

By the numbers

$81,536 Median family income in Wake County in 2009

$107,587 Median family income in Cary

$71,543 Median family income in Raleigh

$74,101 Median family income in Knightdale

$52,308 Median family income in Wendell

$51,250 Median family income in Zebulon

47.5 The percentage of Wake adults who have a four-year degree or higher

62.3 The percentage of Cary adults with at least a four-year degree

47.5 The percentage of Raleigh adults with same 

39.9 The percentage of Knightdale adults with same 

22 The percentage of Wendell adults with same 

10.8 The percentage of Zebulon adults with same

Oct. 7, 2011: Expect schools fallout

This originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Eastern Wake County, you might be surprised to learn, boasts the state's fourth-largest charter school. Almost 1,100 students attend East Wake Academy, a K-12 campus in Zebulon, and its waiting list approaches 600 students.

That so many parents want in might make a person wonder whether there's something they want out of. 

The academy's average three-part SAT score is 1451, below most of the county but higher than Knightdale High, whose 1368 average is the lowest. The academy was recently named a School of Distinction.

Knightdale High also has the county's highest percentage of high schoolers qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch, at 40.4 percent.

And Knightdale High had the county's highest number of teachers requesting transfers last year. Hmm.

 Most of Eastern Wake's schools now have free and reduced-price lunch populations nearing 60 percent. Wakelon Elementary in Zebulon has more than 70 percent. 

Knightdale's Hodge Road Elementary has an F&R population of more than 70 percent, too. Across the street, 76 subsidized apartments are going up. Brilliant.

Right up U.S. 64, Wendell has the county's highest percentage of subsidized affordable units at more than 11 percent of all housing.

Know how much subsidized housing western Wake has? In Morrisville, that'd be 0. Apex? Cary? Each has 1 percent.

We used to have a school board that tried, not terribly successfully, to mitigate the imbalances of our housing patterns by keeping the numbers of poor children assigned to one school as low as possible. It recognized that high-poverty schools are challenging schools, where many children arrive ill-prepared with myriad needs that can burn out teachers quickly. And it realized that wasn't good for the children or the county.

Now we have a board that wanted to make "neighborhood" schools the priority, even though that can create high-poverty schools that can lead those neighborhoods to decay when many residents with the means leave. 

The current board opened Walnut Creek Elementary knowing that more than 80 percent of its students would be poor, but it gave the principal a $7,000 bonus and paid for him to fly around the country to recruit teachers willing to work there.

Because that's a model we can afford to replicate 60 times?

Twist any metric you like to make a point about Charlotte-Mecklenburg, which ended diversity efforts and went to "neighborhood" schools 10 years ago. Know what North Carolina's fastest-growing county is? It ain't on the coast.

It's Union County, right east of Mecklenburg. Hmm.

Despite a move toward board consensus this week on a choice-based assignment plan, far too many questions remain. And the answers will depend on the outcome of Tuesday's school board election.

Johnston County might want to get ready.

Sept. 30, 2011: People are needed more than goods

This originally appeared in The News & Observer:

VANDEMERE On the sidewalks of this Pamlico County town of 254 souls, sticky insulation is piled high. A plaid couch sits in a front yard under shreds of sheetrock. The windows of the decades-old homes lining the main road are open, in the hope that the bare studs inside will dry.

A month after Hurricane Irene sent the Bay River surging into these houses - where fishermen and farmers and tugboat drivers live, where the waters had never reached in recent memory - time has nearly stood still. 

People are waiting. Waiting for insurance checks. Waiting for the plywood floors ripped of soaking, stinking carpet to dry. Hoping for help.

"Our biggest need is volunteers," says the Rev. Scott Fitzgerald, pastor of Bayboro Missionary Baptist Church, which has become disaster-relief central in Pamlico County. "We have all the equipment. We have the people to lead them and do what needs to be done. If they call me and tell me who they're bringing and when they want to come, I can match them up with their skill abilities."

Not food. Not clothes. Not money. The pleas coming from Pamlico are for people. And for mosquito spray. And for fans, because fans are blowing inside wet homes 24 hours a day. Nothing can be rebuilt until everything is dry. And it just keeps raining.

Vandemere, 30 or so miles north of New Bern, is where my friend Donna Tyndall's family has lived for generations. Her father, Jasper Voliva, 71, was a commercial fisherman there, as were his father and grandfather.

It's a town where everybody knows everybody, where the people who see Donna as we walk around looking at the destruction hug her and ask after her mama, Julia, who is going through chemo for lymphoma.

Jasper and Julia have lived in their home on the town's main thoroughfare for more than 50 years, but don't ask Jasper whether he has lived his whole life in Vandemere. He'll tell you with a twinkle in his blue eye that his life's not quite done yet, thanks.

Daughter Anna Simeon and her husband, Greg, live beside them with their youngest child, and daughter Crystal Paul and her three children live across the street. Donna and her husband, Kevin, live around the corner with Donna's two sons.

When Irene came calling Aug. 27, all four families were flooded out of their homes - and dispersed.

The two Volivas, the three Simeons and the four Pauls are piled into a doublewide a few streets over; its owner recently passed away, and his relatives were kind enough to say, "Y'all use it."

The Tyndalls have moved into Kevin's mother's house miles away, closer to New Bern, where Donna works in a surgical office, but too far away from Julia for Donna's comfort. She calls her mama every day and hates that she can't see her that often now, thanks to Irene.

"We've had to do what we had to do," Donna says. "Families, whoever got flooded, you take your family in. Everybody's just living with everybody until it gets fixed."

Donna will tell you she has it better than most. She and Kevin had flood and content insurance because the mortgage company required it. A lot of people in Vandemere didn't have such insurance because they have lived there so long, and they own their homes, which had never been flooded before. 

With no money coming and no way to do the work themselves, Donna wonders how many of her hardscrabble neighbors can possibly go on.

"The first thing most everybody did was rip the carpet out," she says. "And you've got older people. It's hard for these people who can't physically do this work - move the furniture, rip carpet out. When we ripped Mama's carpet out, it was still dripping water. It's heavy."

'We'll get through it'

Exactly a month after the hurricane, Julia's ruined pantry is still sitting among her other possessions on the sidewalk, which is strewn with LEGO blocks, crayons, linoleum shards and broken Christmas bulbs.

"This isn't a big city where people have big-city jobs," Donna says. "Most people live off the land or the water. It's bad. When you ride along the road and you just see everybody's possessions, everything they had on the side of the road, it's kind of heartbreaking."

Right next to the Bay River, Benny Rose Jr. is pacing in front of a huge pile of debris that used to be his mother's house. The brick beauty had stood for more than 40 years without being flooded. After Irene, it had to be bulldozed.

He asks Donna about Ms. Julia and her chemo. She asks about his mama, Margaret, and how she's doing in the wake of her bulldozed home. Benny has come to see the remains because Ms. Margaret simply can't face it.

As we swat continuously, talk turns to the mosquitoes, which have bred to epic proportions in all of the standing water. The two decide maybe the biters aren't near as bad as they were last week, when The N&O ran a story citing an internationally known expert saying he had found in Pamlico County this month the highest concentrations of the insect that he has ever encountered in the nation.

But the bugs are still bad enough that the children have not played outside since the hurricane.

Bad enough that nobody can mow the grass, if they took a notion to, which only adds one more eyesore to the depressing landscape.

"We'll get through it," Benny tells Donna as they hug. "Everybody's still here. That's what matters."

Hopeful but tired

It's a sentiment Donna has expressed numerous times throughout the evening. She feels especially blessed because Kevin's family owns Pamlico Home Builders, and he clearly knows how to wield a hammer.

With the additional help of Donna's two teenage boys - and the comfort of knowing an insurance check, size is still a question, at least is coming - her house is emptied and ready for work.

"People are trying to stay positive and help each other," she says. "I don't know what we would have done without churches, even ones outside Pamlico County. We've had a real outpouring in this community, really helping each other." 

But the people of Pamlico are tired. They have to work their jobs, then try to repair their homes while displaced or while living in the top of a damaged and foul-smelling two-story home or, in some cases, tents in their still-wet yards.

The Rev. Fitzgerald of the Bayboro Baptist Church welcomes help any day, any time. Just call.

"If you have 15 people coming down in one day, we could use 200 people coming on a day," he said. "We could use 300 people coming. We've got over 300 or 400 jobs that need to be done, and I'm sure that's not all the jobs. That's just the ones who have come here who said, 'I need help.' 

"The more people who come, the faster we can get things done."

Sept. 23, 2011: Grandparents' dilemma

First column as an official columnist at The News & Observer:

Foster parents receive aid, but none is available for grandparents who take in grandchildren

CLAYTON Faith is 4 and friendly. Standing in her driveway, she opens her hand and shares the treasure of toys she has clenched inside it. But first she pushes dark hair out of her clear blue eyes and makes sure you know that her name starts with F. 

Her 16-month-old sister, Emagine, is crying because she doesn't want to go inside. Once through the door, brother Aiden, 6, disappears, off to play a game. And Kearston, 2 and first cousin to the others, wants some Cheerios, a word that is nearly unintelligible but that grandma Linda Alves immediately understands.

Alves' kitchen, even with scattered cereal, is stylish, and her three-story home (if you count the unfinished attic) has a healthy green yard lined by a white picket fence. She bought the house in 2007 as her forever-after house - and now she might have to sell it. 

Alves is struggling financially because of doing what she believes is the right thing: She and husband, Frank, became legal guardians to these four grandchildren - three born to their older daughter and one to their younger - after the mothers lost custody. The Alveses, also parents to a 13-year-old son, are now on a mission to get kinship guardians the same money that foster parents get.

"I've posted on all the politicians' Facebooks. I've sent them all emails, parades of phone calls," Linda Alves says. "I've called churches. I've talked to everyone who would listen to me."

It seems wrong to them that the government would pay foster families $475 a month to care for each of the three younger children and $581 a month for Aiden, if only the Alveses gave the children up. The children receive free child care and Medicaid, but the couple get little help with the $300 to $400 a week they spend on groceries and diapers. 

Not to mention clothing. Aiden has one pair of shoes, and Linda Alves doesn't know how she'll buy more when he outgrows them.

"I've worked my whole life. So has my husband. And when it gets too tight, I'm left waiting in a food bank line," she says. "If you take everything away from these kids and give them to strangers, they can get shoes. So the state wants them to choose. Do you want your family, or do you want shoes?"

It's that impossible choice that drives Alves, 42, a manager at a Clayton store.

"When it started out, it was simply about me and what I wasn't getting for these kids. But I've had DSS telling me about kids coming out of homes with kin who want them but can't afford it," she says. "I've become angry about it. What about grandparents who can't advocate? The aunts and uncles out there just sucking it up?"

Just last week, thousands of grandparents from across the nation rallied in Washington to raise awareness about the number of Americans struggling to raise grandchildren - a number that has only increased since the recession. In North Carolina alone, the 2010 census found 98,493 grandparents responsible for their grandchildren. 

Help from church

On Facebook, Alves started a Kinship Without Support page, and hopes to take the petition she posted there to the General Assembly in May to persuade some lawmakers to help. 

But she has not limited her pleas to government bodies. "I have more churches behind me than officials. Almost every church I've contacted has said, 'Yes, how can I help?' " 

Her church, Hope Church in Clayton, has volunteered to finish the family's attic, although it is hoping to get materials donated. It's a critical need because two more grandchildren might join them, Alves says. 

The elder daughter, who lost and regained custody of her children several times, has a fourth child, a 2-year-old boy who remains with a foster mother because of respiratory problems. The Alveses are trying to gain custody of him, too.

And their younger daughter is pregnant again, and they anticipate maybe having to care for that child, too.

"We've gone so deep into it with the kids that if we don't take one, in 18 years, will they say, 'Why did my sister or brother get to stay and I didn't?' Why is one less worthy of fighting for than the other?"

Yes, Linda Alves says, she can hear the compassionless critics in her head, those who will offer only condemnation about six children born to two unwed daughters with only one of the fathers occasionally offering support. She stresses that she and Frank, 50, left behind careers and family in 2007 when they moved from California specifically to try to remove their younger daughter from a bad situation.

"Your children reach age 18 and decide who they want to be," she says. "I raised my children in church. I wanted better choices from them, but they decide. This is not how you picture grandparenthood. This is not what I had in mind."

And the fact remains: Aiden, Faith, Emagine and Kearston are here, part of our community. And they did nothing wrong. They are the innocents who deserve the best we can do for them. 

Night terrors

Sometimes, deep at night, Alves finds herself scared. And Frank, a correctional officer at Central Prison in Raleigh, occasionally wonders whether they can continue. 

"We won't give them up," Alves says determinedly. "If something doesn't happen, we'll have to sell our house. I've looked at other ones in not desirable areas. 

"Where do you cut down their quality of life from? What do we have to give up to keep them? We're pretty much going to have to give up everything."

Sept. 8, 2011: He's driven to help those in need

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

By Burgetta Eplin Wheeler
Staff Writer

Jeff Ogus felt guilty taking off Labor Day. In more than a decade of driving a tractor-trailer for the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina, he has never taken a sick day and, until he had a fiance to insist, he rarely took vacation.

So having a holiday in the middle of the food bank's relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Irene just didn't sit right with the Knightdale man.

Last week, Ogus and other food bank drivers started shifts at 4 a.m. to get much-needed cleaning products, paper goods, snacks, diapers and water to the Raleigh-based food bank's eastern warehouses that continue to serve Irene's hardest-hit areas.

"We pick up and deliver the goods to the people who get it to those in need," Ogus said of the agency's drivers. "They don't see us, but we're the first line of offense. I know every day that what I'm doing, that 450,000 to 500,000 people in our 34-county service area can benefit from it."

Nineteen of those counties have been declared federal disaster areas since Irene. 

Food Bank President Peter Werbicki said the nonprofit agency had sent its first trucks eastward the day after the Aug. 27 hurricane. By Wednesday, the nonprofit had moved about 200,000 pounds of goods into the most-affected counties. At least through September, the food bank will focus on filling the need in coastal counties. 

Werbicki said the agency needs the Triangle community's help so that it doesn't become a matter of "robbing Peter to pay Paul."

"The way this community can support the community Down East is by providing cleaning supplies, personal hygiene items, sort of quick and simple ready-to-eat meals," Werbicki said. "Healthy snacks, healthy juices and drinks would be very useful. Obviously, it's taken additional resources, additional trucking. Gas is so expensive. Financial donations would help us recover for the relief effort."

'Like a bomb went off'

Even when he's not in disaster mode, Ogus gases up his tractor-trailer about every three days, at a cost of $600 a pop. The food bank has two tractor-trailers and about 20 trucks in all.

Ogus, who routinely picks up and delivers donations around a circle that includes Charlotte, Boone, Elizabeth City, Wilmington, Fayetteville and Southern Pines, spent two days in New Bern last week but said nothing he has seen post-Irene compares with U.S. 301 north of Rocky Mount to Halifax: "It looks like a bomb went off up there."

With four more weather systems swirling around the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday, keeping the N.C. Food Bank stocked has an urgency to it. 

"We know here that September can be the time we get hit, and we're worried something could add on to this," Werbicki said.

On a typical day, Ogus leaves the Raleigh warehouse in the morning and drives to one of the agency's other five warehouses to distribute a load. 

He then heads to another city where someone wants to donate goods and brings the donations to Raleigh. Last week, for instance, a trip to New Bern to unload hurricane relief supplies was followed by a stop in Wilson to pick up a load of canned yams donated by Bruce Foods to bring back to Raleigh.

Help needed every day

Ogus gets great personal satisfaction working for the food bank and has been impressed with how people have stepped up to help since the hurricane.

"There have been cars lined up outside the food bank to donate," he said. "If everyone just went online and gave $1 donation, what a difference we could make. ... But we need this every day, not just when a disaster strikes."

Helping with disasters like the hurricane in addition to maintaining the agency's usual regimen requires a huge logistical effort, Werbicki said.

 "Getting the drivers and trucks around, replenishing or moving products around and moving loads out so the partner agencies we're working with can do their jobs - it's a lot," he said.

Ogus, who is in charge of the food bank's DOT compliance efforts and of training and testing new drivers, hasn't had to train many drivers because of employee turnover. People who work there love it, he said, and stay. But he has trained two additional drivers in three years.

"We're growing, and that's a bad thing. It means there's more need," he said.

 "If we could somehow end hunger and put me out of a job, I'd sign up for unemployment tomorrow."

Sept. 9, 2011: First day of school a finale of a series

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

When the waiter hands us our menus, my best friend and I simultaneously reach into our purses for our reading glasses and then laugh at each other as the cases pop open. When we started this tradition in 1999, we both could actually see.

That was the year we dropped off our babies for their first day of kindergarten and met for lunch somewhere or other to console each other. Since then, we've met for lunch on the first day of school every year.

No doubt, if we cared to check the photographic evidence, we'd discover that we both had horrific perms in 1999. This year, we're both sporting defiantly uncolored gray, and it takes three pieces of cheesecake between us to make this somewhat sorrowful day sweeter. 

Because this first-day lunch will be the last. 

My baby is now a 240-pound offensive lineman senior at Broughton High, and hers is an actor driving a 342-pound wheelchair at Enloe High. For all of us, it has been quite a ride.

Through the years, our lunch chatter has always included worries on navigating a new school year with our sons who have some special needs (about 20 percent of schoolchildren in Wake County fit that category). Could I have ever anticipated trying to get "lies in floor while chewing candy for fourth-grade writing test" added to my son's Individual Education Plan to accommodate his Sensory Processing Disorder? Could Cindy have known that fifth grade would bring a child so exhausted from his deteriorating condition due to spinal muscular atrophy that she would have to pick him up at noon for weeks?

For Cindy, fifth grade also brought a frantic search for a magnet middle school after the principal at her assigned school refused, once it was ascertained that there were no suitable electives for her son, to let him just go home and rest. He could sit in the library, the principal said. For me, that year brought a battle with the student assignment office, which found it difficult to believe that, yes, indeed, I wanted my two middle school children at separate schools because my son needed to be at a smaller school. 

Sixth grade was the year my son won a spot in his school's geography bee, an honor he nearly missed because the fellow student who graded his paper had marked half of his right answers wrong. She couldn't read his writing, illegibility being a hallmark of his fine-motor disorder. His teacher thankfully noticed.

For Cindy's son, it would be hard to top seventh grade - the year he spent his 13th birthday trapped on the second floor of his newly renovated school because the brand-new elevator was broken for the zillionth time. Five firefighters showed up, not to carry her son, who trusted only the 6-foot-5 special ed teacher to carry him, but to carry the electric wheelchair. Cindy had central office on speed dial that year.

High school brought, for me, an honors science teacher who thought it would be better to move my son out of the class, with its high concentration on lab drawings, than to work with his issues. 

For Cindy, it brought bureaucratic insanity as she tried to bypass a state law requiring all students to take P.E. and health to graduate. Her son, who has never walked, can barely lift a spoon to his mouth, and the state was willing to pay a teacher to give him one-on-one P.E. just to meet this requirement. After much aggravation, she has gotten a waiver. The same year, her son was unable to take the one acting elective he wanted because the physicality of the class was too much for him. Oh, the irony.

As a salve for the most maddening moments, we have the sweetest stories. The teacher of a physically challenging elementary elective who would tell me with tears in her eyes how much my son's earnest hard work touched her. The middle school drama teacher who cast Cindy's son in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and made King Oberon in a wheelchair work. 

Or the eighth-grade social studies teacher who called me unbidden, literally crying, to apologize after she handed my son a map he had colored on the first day of school and told him to do a better job. The stricken look on his face had her check his IEP, and she was devastated at her mistake. The school system physical therapist who showed up at Cindy's house this summer just because she wanted to better understand the process of his getting a new $28,000 wheelchair. 

Or the Broughton principal who truly listens and sounds all of the right notes of concern. The Enloe English teacher who encourages Cindy's son in his writing.

Next up for us is getting these boys, now young men, into college. During the process, we may rid ourselves of the gray hair simply by tearing it all out. The soothing comfort of a forever friendship and the cheering power of cheesecake, however, await.

Aug. 19, 2011: Nursing as child's play

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

The young girl in the Breast Milk Baby doll ad is smiling brightly, happily anticipating the fun of nursing her doll once the halter sporting the two hot-pink flowers is tied snugly into place.

When the doll's mouth touches a flower, sensors will bring on sucking sounds and motions. That the flowers resemble pasties is unfortunate, given the hullabaloo over whether the doll, a product of Berjuan Toys of Spain, oversexualizes children.

Any woman who has returned to work from maternity leave only to sit horrified as a leak devours a nursing pad and spreads across her blouse during an important meeting knows that breast-feeding is about as sexual as toothpaste.

But when Berjuan recently began U.S. sales of the doll, a best-seller in Europe that the company said millions of American women had begged for, let's just say that not everyone was waiting with a warm receiving blanket. One Fox News guest expert, in fact, was outraged, saying the doll further blurred the line between little girls and adult women and would only encourage pedophiles.

What more reasonable people might legitimately find outrageous is the doll's price tag: $118 on amazon.com and an $89 "Limited Time Offer!" on the Berjuan website (thebreastmilkbaby.com).

Despite the cost, Josee Meehan, a Durham mother of three, might buy a doll for her daughter because she thinks it will help alter society's view of women's breasts as strictly cosmetic. 

"People are so uncomfortable with the motherhood slice of womanhood but are perfectly happy to promote the sexualized version of women," she said. "They teach their little girls about the most superficial aspect of womanhood and ignore the most important parts."

The fact that the setup isn't anatomically correct makes the company's claims about its advocacy intentions hard for Kim Spicer, a labor and delivery nurse for 25 years, to swallow.

"I think it's a little over the top," said Spicer, a mother of three in Knightdale. "I guess they tried to make it more appealing to kids, but make nipples that look like nipples, not flowers, if the purpose is to promote breast-feeding."

Erin Tew of Garner wavers between being appalled by the doll and thinking it's just silly. "I'm all for breast-feeding," said the mother of six children, ranging in age from 10 to 7 months. "But that doll's a little ridiculous for kids. That's something they need to experience when they're grown, not when they're 3."

Even 17 years after the birth of my second child, my heart always fills with sadness for a new mother who can't seem to breast-feed or has chosen not to, knowing so well the unbelievable bond and life-altering experience she's going to miss. Anything that promotes breast-feeding, which the CDC calls a national priority, I want to welcome.

But any parent who would buy The Breast Milk Baby is a parent who would influence a daughter to breast-feed anyway. 

And, more important, a lot of children already watch mom nurse the new baby and then pretend to breast-feed their dolls. Or their stuffed animals. Or the dog.

The Breast Milk Baby is just one more toy that robs our children of chances to use their wonderful imaginations - a far greater thievery than even its $118 price tag.

Aug. 14, 2011: 'The Help' – Two views of a controversial film

Originally appeared in the features section of The News & Observer:

By Burgetta Eplin Wheeler

Staff writer

The college professor teaching my freshman music appreciation class circled the word three times in red, adding a couple of exclamation points for emphasis. The grade on my review of a Lionel Hampton Orchestra performance is lost to time, but my mortification over my ignorance in referring in it to black people as "Negroes" stings to this day. 

Growing up in the 1970s in an all-white West Virginia subdivision, in an all-white town, I lived in an isolated world that held exactly two African-Americans: the one black girl who briefly attended my high school with 1,300 white students and the one lovely black woman who occasionally led my mother's charismatic Christian women's fellowship. No one called April "the black student." No one called Myrna the "black woman." They were just April and Myrna. 

So I didn't know how black people were referring to their ethnicity. In high school, I had written a research paper on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, having sat transfixed inside the area's largest library as I listened to scratchy recordings of his powerful words - words that included "Negro."

I just didn't know the times had changed. It wasn't malicious. It was ignorance. 

And that's part of the beauty of movies and books like "The Help." Among the heart-stirring characters and laugh-out-loud-funny dialogue lies a sobering education in the realities of the Jim Crow South. It's a lesson we still need, given that the farther we get from the 1960s, the harder it can be to believe that this horror actually occurred in our country. 

As I watched a special screening of "The Help" - a superb movie in nearly every way - I kept thinking that its real power lay in leading us to the empathy a functioning society requires. My eyes welled up the first of several times during a scene in which black people were streaming up the steps of a restaurant, dutifully following the path marked "Colored." That sign, the cruelty and indignity of it, never fails to affect me this way. 

That I was a white person sitting among a mostly African-American audience made my usual disgust over that sign especially acute. That the vast majority of the movie's white characters were reprehensible (and no doubt historically accurate) left me cringing. That the black characters were so real, so complex and so likable had me wondering why some African-Americans have so vehemently assailed the book the movie is based upon. 

In an essay in Entertainment Weekly, writer Martha Southgate said that "The Help" to her is just another story in which a white person plays the hero of the civil rights movement, relegating blacks to bit players. 

But even Skeeter, the white protagonist who is gathering up the stories of black maids working in white homes for an expose-type book, says when another character asks how she feels: This isn't about me. It doesn't matter how I feel. 

And that's how the movie felt to me. That it wasn't about her. It was about looking beyond the ubiquitous maid's uniform that apparently made black women invisible (when they weren't subhuman) in certain upper-class homes of the South in the 1960s and seeing them, acknowledging them and their pain, knowing them, empathizing with them. And loving them. 

"What does it feel like to be me?" asks Aibileen, the courageous star of this story, somewhat in wonder after Skeeter tries to draw from her the stories of being a maid in a hideous white home. Aibileen invokes the agony of losing her beloved son, who died when a white foreman at a lumber yard threw the severely injured worker into the back of his pickup truck and dumped him at the black hospital across town with only a honk. 

"Every year on the day of his death, I can't breathe, and to you all it's just another day of (playing) bridge," Aibileen says. 

No one who sees "The Help" can leave it without acknowledging the real cruelty and indignities that so many African-Americans endured in this country. No viewer can later say, "I just didn't know."

July 17, 2011: Where swimmers meet: Neighborhood competitions make sports and summers memorable

Originally appeared in the Arts & Leisure section of The News & Observer:

My right thumb is twitching, unaccustomed as it is to my hand's emptiness on a summer Tuesday night. 

There's no stopwatch to click inside my curled fingers, and my ears aren't straining to hear the horn that will send swimmers sailing off the blocks to the whoops and whistles of their neighborhood teammates and sweat-drenched parents.

For the first time in 13 years, I'm not standing on concrete in the heavy heat, not holding a clipboard and not timing a Planter's Walk Piranha in my lane during the first summer meet of the season. My daughter, now 19, has aged out of the sport after donning her first pair of goggles at age 6, her front teeth missing and her happy eyes chlorine-bloodshot in a 1998 snapshot during her first season.

But more than 10,000 other Wake County children on 78 Tarheel Swimming Association teams have been churning up the water every Tuesday this summer. A few elite teams recruit year-round swimmers to increase their chances of winning, but, for the most part, these neighborhood teams are wonderful little worlds of everything we should want a childhood sport to be.

Some teams have 150 or more swimmers, girls and boys, ranging in age from 4 to 18 - and there ain't no bench. Everybody swims. And the competition, more often than not, is between a swimmer and herself. Did she swim that backstroke a second faster than she did last week? She's a winner!

At a meet, 6-year-olds mingle with 15-year-old mentors they wouldn't otherwise have known in a neighborhood with hundreds of homes. 

Parents who had never met before swim practice began stand together, some with tears in their eyes, and clap in unison when an 8-year-old finally touches the wall after flailing down the lane, eyes shut, his wayward goggles around his neck.

At a meet, this child, and several more like him, can clamber out of the pool in last place, smile widely with Ring-Pop-stained lips and ask a mother earnestly, "Did I win?" And she can say honestly, given that he finished the race, "You did great!"

It's a sport that inspires team spirit when scores of prepubescent screamers of both sexes jump up and down and nearly faint from the exertion when their 15-to-18-year-old boys' freestyle relay team out-touches the other team by a second. It's a sport that bonds kids who go their separate ways during the school year. Four-member relay teams on our neighborhood squad routinely are made up of swimmers who go to four different schools.

It's a sport for which the sting of losing lasts only as long as the ride between the pool and the closest ice cream parlor, where the team is gathering to stretch out the camaraderie for as long as possible.

It's a sport that inspires such devotion that one gregarious guy has manned the grill at our snack bar - his barker call of "Hotdogs! Hamburgers! Get your hotdogs, hamburgers!" always eliciting  laughs - even during years he couldn't talk one of his three children into swimming.

Letting go of my own devotion has been difficult. 

I can take some comfort, I guess, from knowing my feet won't ache for days now after standing four solid hours behind the blocks with a stopwatch in my hand. My heart, however, is going to ache for a good long while.

April 29, 2009: The N&O's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Thirty-one newsroom colleagues are leaving today. That's a number those of us remaining can't even process really, especially when you add in the number of those we've lost already in earlier rounds of job cuts.

Used to be when a news staffer left, there'd be cake in the newsroom, a few kind words - or many kind words if that someone had been here a decade or two - words that included a recognition of the appreciated contributions.

As far as I know, there's no cake today. And I don't know whether there will be any words at all. Because finding any that are a comfort at this point is nearly impossible.

Sitting where I do, as the gatekeeper to the letters to The N&O, I've read plenty now from people downright gleeful about the "demise" of The N&O. I'm not sure why some people still don't understand that many newspapers, The N&O included, are doing just fine circulation-wise, thanks. It's the toilet-swirling advertising revenues and the amount of debt our parent company holds that have brought us to this incredibly rotten day at The N&O.

Good people and amazingly talented journalists, not agenda-pushing liberal demons, are headed out into the unknown - many of them unknown to you, the reader, but integral parts of what you see.

These are people who felt a calling, much like nurses and doctors and teachers, who do their jobs not for the money (heaven knows) but for the public, for you and for themselves, because they understand the critical role a newspaper plays in our democracy. Many of them toiled at night - till midnight, 1 or 2 a.m. - for years and years to bring you a morning paper.

There's Moe, whose name you've seen only in 7-point type under some graphics, but who among 1,000 various graphic-related things makes sure your weather map and all its various parts are in your paper correctly. There is not a kinder, steadier, more unflappable, knowledgeable person at this newspaper. In my 22 years here, I have never seen the man angry, and that's saying something.

There's Van, who would be in a tight race with Moe for steadiest and kindest. Van, who always believes the best of people, who sees them with only good intentions. As an editor, Van is the person in the building who always, above everyone else, put the reader first. You've lost your best advocate.

And Lou, one of the best headline writers we have here. If you've seen an excellent headline on a Durham-datelined story, chances are it was written by Lou or Bill, both lost in the last round of buyouts.

And Josee and Laurie, hard-working, creative and smart moms working part-time on the Copy Desk. We lost every part-timer, which only diminishes our diversity of backgrounds and life experiences.

And Winston, who as the Night Editor for years and years trained innumerable young reporters who always seemed to start on the cops beat and reported to Winston. I can't imagine there's anyone else here who has had a larger hand in training up the cubs in the ways they should go.

And Rob and Eileen, who came with a wave of California folk in the mid-90s who wanted to call our front page "the cover" (heresy!) but whom you had to forgive for it when you discovered what amazing journalists they were. It would be hard to count the number of 75-word New York Times sentences that Eileen has saved you from over her years here as a copy editor.

And Ned, whom I haven't really ever worked with but whom I have heard called at least 20 times since we heard he'd be leaving "the best newspaper editor The N&O has ever had."

There's Jane, who with grace and enthusiasm always was willing to take on a new role for the good of the whole.

And Peder, of course, who was able to tell you goodbye in one more excellent Sunday column. Peder, my fellow conservative-leaning colleague who never shied away from coming to debate the issues with the Editorial Department, a healthy thing for any newspaper. We had already been forced to mourn the passing of his brilliant book columns; now we must mourn the death of Peder's ideas among our pages.

And there's Wade and Joe and Joyce and Marti and Bonnie and Becky and Colline and Paul and the many others who were holding up their ends of our daily offering.

Tomorrow, when this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day is over, the rest of us at this amazingly wonderful newspaper will carry on with the calling, but with holes in our hearts.

Feb. 25, 2006: Not ready for raunchy

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

With its parental-advisory label warning of "explicit content," the latest Blink-182 CD isn't one I would have let my children buy. It showed up in my house as a present, a bootleg birthday bonanza of bona fide filth.

The fellow eighth-grader who gave it to my daughter also was kind enough to include some of Blink's previous delightful ditties, one of which was titled, "[Penis] Lips."

If you are a parent who thinks it's fine for middle-schoolers to be hooked up to MP3 players dispensing such gems directly into their ear canals, I have to ask:

What are you thinking?

My 11-year-old son recently was invited to a birthday party for a girl turning 12. The invitation requested that I drop off my child at a movie theater and pick him up later at the girl's house. There was no mention of what movie was on the agenda. I -- gasp -- called and asked, because my children don't see a PG-13 movie unless I have seen it first.

The girl's mother said they'd be seeing "Cheaper by the Dozen 2" because it was the only movie showing at the time that was rated PG. I was ecstatic. Another mother was actually on my parenting page.

Or not. The highlight of the after-party at the house was a deejay playing all the latest hits, which included, among other tasty tidbits, "Laffy Taffy," a rap song that equates male genitalia to hard candy.

"It was the cleaned-up version, Mom," my son said so earnestly on the way home. "Cleaned up" in this instance means they took out the obscenities. It doesn't mean they took out all of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge euphemisms for every sexual act imaginable.

Again, I must ask, what are parents thinking?

A neighbor child, two years younger than my sixth-grade son, has been exposed to R-rated movies apparently since birth. My son routinely asks whether he can see this or that movie over at the house of the other child, who nearly always has already seen the movie in question, regardless of its rating.

I had to disappoint my son, yet again, this month when I said no to a PG-13-rated skateboarding flick. "It just has cuss words, and the make-out scenes aren't that bad," said the fourth-grader, reassuringly.

Um, no. No, no, no, no!

What are you people thinking?

Ah, but there's the problem. Many parents aren't thinking. Thinking requires energy and time and commitment and a willingness, when you act upon your thinking, to make your children unhappy. Giving in is easy, turning a blind eye a snap. Having high standards of what's appropriate -- and sticking to them -- is not.

I realize that I can't protect my children from a world gone what I consider positively insane when it comes to what we expose our children to -- and what we let them expose to us from their extra-low-rise blue jeans. How many butt cracks and "muffin tops" can one shopping mall hold? All I can do is pray that I've given my children a firm foundation from which they can grow into admirable people who make good choices. It's a tough-enough journey without other parents creating unnecessary mudholes for us to slog through.

There's a reason some music is labeled with a parental advisory.

There's a reason certain movies are rated PG-13 and R.

It shouldn't be unreasonable to expect other adults to understand that.

Burgetta Eplin Wheeler is assistant editor of The N&O's Q section, which appears on Sundays.

Oct. 19, 1996: Light dims at the end of life's tunnel

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Lured by the promise of a tickle, many a woman and child have sent their unbidden palms gliding over the glistening bristles of Grandpa's white flattop.

For years he enjoyed the attention paid to his handsome head, sparingly adorned but still irresistible to strangers who itched to see whether his hair really could be the living equivalent of a shoeshine brush.

Today, the hair is nearly gone, shaved down to the quick because his weekly trips to the barber shop have ended. The barber must be brought in now, waiting his turn among the nurses and aides who attend the infirm, some betrayed by time-worn bodies, others by deteriorating minds.

And as the ranks of the elderly increase, so do the the legions of loved ones left despairing over how to help make longevity a gift.

Grandpa is 81, felled by a series of strokes followed by a series of falls. The last one broke his collarbone and sent his 80-year-old wife sprawling, her glasses broken, her tailbone bruised. Once she struggled to her feet, she couldn't get him off the kitchen floor.

In the emergency room, the young doctor looks sorrowful as he tells Grandma he'll be calling in a social worker. She can no longer care for her mate, whose scrawny knees betrayed him years ago and whose arms are now idled by the collarbone injury.

The referral leads to a bed in a two-man room on the ground-floor of a personal-care facility. The eye-watering odor of pine cleaner emanates from the weathered, white house, assaulting visitors even as they drive up to the gravel parking lot out back.

His roommate is not of sound mind, and the aides mercifully keep him busy outside much of the day. At night, however, the man must be allowed his bed, and he frequently rouses from it to urinate on the floor.

Several exposed pipes run the length of the ceiling, and the tile floors are cold - just another reason to keep unsure feet and the rest of a weary body up in the bed.

Not that Grandpa needs a reason. He doesn't want to leave the bed.

With each new fall, and with each loss of some treasured piece of his humanity, the thoughts of suicide grew stronger until a gun was brought from its hiding place and put into service. It, too, was too old and broken down. It failed to go off.

But suicide toys with him still and guilt has come courting his wife - guilt from being unable to care for him and guilt from feeling relieved that she doesn't have to anymore.

At the personal-care home, his loud snoring goes unnoticed as people scurry by the open door. Privacy is not a resident here. He awakens with a start, and tears fill his blue eyes. The one hand he can move connects haltingly with his face, and he wipes at his tears, his lips mouthing his mantra.

It's hard to understand him because his teeth are in the cup on the metal nightstand, which shelters the few belongings that have followed him here: the lacquered domino set, a deck of cards and his favorite Pecan Sandie cookies.

His shoulder hurts, and he's moaning. He wants to die, and he says it over and over and over again. He talks of his head aching, and it must be a frightful pain because he's lifting even his bad arm so he can put both hands on his face as he rocks back and forth.

His granddaughter slips to the edge of the bed and gently pulls at his hands, asking where it hurts so she can kiss it for him. Her lips find his pale forehead, then linger on the top of his head as she remembers the prickly flattop of long ago. His lifeless hair now brings only tears.

His longevity remains a gift to her and a burden for him.

(Burgetta Wheeler is assistant news editor.)

Aug. 12, 1996: The aid of everyday angels

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Wearing a bright bathing suit, Kathi Korobko flits about her Cary kitchen like a butterfly, refusing to stop dinner preparations for a second to consider a suggestion that she has more in common with another winged creature - an angel.

"I love the Lord, I walk with the Lord, but I hope I'm more down to Earth than that," says a laughing Korobko, who has just come dripping from the backyard pool.

Down on Earth a few Sundays ago, she walked with the Lord into the hearts of another Cary family.

Gorgeous weather greeted Korobko as she awoke that Sunday. Her married daughter, Julie Volstad, was visiting from Georgia, and the two decided to walk home from the Cary Christian and Missionary Alliance Church that afternoon.

The women took off down Har-rison Avenue, soon passing First Baptist Church, where Julie spied a small, brunet boy tooling around the parking lot in a wheelchair.

"Hey, Ma, look at that," Julie said as Korobko stopped beside her. They paused not because the sight of a 25-pound child in a 130-pound wheelchair was unique to them but because it was all too familiar.

Korobko has a small, brunet son who has been through numerous wheelchairs in his 23 years of life.

This child, though, was only 2, and Korobko stood transfixed.

"I have to go talk to those people," Korobko told Julie. The two waited as the boy's parents chatted with other First Baptist members as he practiced maneuvering his chair.

"I felt really uncomfortable just standing there," Korobko says now, "but then I heard the boy's dad say, 'Kevin.' "

Pausing to let that revelation sink in, Korobko smiles, for Kevin is the name of her son, too.

"Here's one tiny example of how God works," says Korobko, who laughs easily and often. "He gave us this little connection to help us feel comfortable from the very start."

Korobko approached the couple, Glenn and Cindy Schaefer of Cary, asked about their Kevin and tried to offer emotional support to the mother just starting out on the path Korobko has traveled for more than 20 years.

Korobko's Kevin, one of only 23 metatrophic dwarves in the world, and Kevin Schaefer, who has spinal muscular atrophy, both have life expectancies of late teens or early 20s.

As they talked, Korobko noticed that the Schaefers' full-size van had no electrical wheelchair lift, only metal ramps they had borrowed.

The van, she was told, had put the Schaefers in a financial bind. They had left the question of a $5,000 wheelchair lift in God's hands, as they had a number of needs since Kevin was diagnosed with his genetic disorder in June 1995.

"We have a lift you can have," Korobko said nonchalantly to the stunned couple.

The Korobkos had recently bought a minivan, with a new wheelchair lift, and were planning to sell their full-size van, which had a 15-year-old lift stuck to its back.

Coincidence? "There's no such thing," Korobko scoffs. "God is so big. He's so awesome, just to see the different ways he works."

After exchanging phone numbers, the families parted, one to share an astonishing story of God's mercy with tearful relatives and friends and the other to keep what it considered its unremarkable generosity to itself.

"It doesn't feel big and wonderful to us," says Korobko. "I was raised to do what's called for ... and an awareness of others' needs is one of those things."

To the Schaefers, however, the Korobkos' act of kindness is nothing short of a miracle. They were trusting God for a wheelchair lift and He sent them one - by way of an angel named Kathi Korobko.

Burgetta Wheeler is assistant news editor.

March 31, 1996: A painful land of opportunity

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Teetering about 40 feet above the Guyandotte River, the brick-red shack looks one storm away from going for a swim, or at least it always seems that way to me when I drive down U.S. 60 in Huntington, W.Va., and find the sorry thing still clinging to the bank.

Hubcaps hang from its peeling sides and spill out onto the grass, adding a metal glint to the litter along a highway that too many boarded-up businesses and weed-choked eyesores call home.

I don't know the Hubcap Boys, as I've taken to calling the proprietors, but their little stretch of road somehow symbolizes for me why I can never go home.

In the two years it took my husband to get his electronics degree in West Virginia, there were two jobs in his field posted in the local classifieds. Two years, two jobs.

Every Sunday in The News & Observer, there are 15 positions in his field. Every Sunday.

And that's the reality of why some of the 24,000 people who settle in the Triangle every year pack up their lives, choke out their goodbyes to their friends and families, and travel the road of opportunity to North Carolina.

Bigger and better jobs entice plenty of people, but just the hope of any decent job motivates many.

Economic realities, however, do little to soothe a shredded heart when your mother-in-law talks wistfully of realizing, now that your new niece lives five miles away from her in West Virginia, how much she's missed your children.

Or when you drive to the Chinese buffet after church on Sundays and sit among strangers, knowing that your grandparents and your brother and his wife are sitting in your mom's seafoam-green dining room having her roast beef with gravy and perfect iced tea.

Or when you sit on a dusty dance floor watching the sashays of your intent 4-year-old angel child, wondering whether her grandparents will ever see her in a ballet recital, a school play, a band concert.

My husband and I were just two of the 45,791 people who migrated to North Carolina in 1987. There were more than 73,000 newcomers in 1994. In every nook of the Triangle, in each cookie-cutter subdivision, are people thankful to be basking in the myriad niceties but hurting nonetheless in their kinless anonymity.

Envy is not an emotion I know intimately, but I flirt with it routinely when one of my best friends talks of meeting her dad for bagels in Cary and the other of taking her children into Raleigh to buy shoes with her mother-in-law, who's paying.

Yes, North Carolina has brought me some friends I love fiercely, but it takes years to cultivate that "comfortability" of family, to lift the shades on all of the little windows that show who we really are. It's well worth the effort, but so few people these days seem to have the time or the emotional wherewithal to get past the weather and basketball.

When I start wallowing in my dreams of West Virginia - living where I can pop in for lunch at my mom's restaurant, where my in-laws can chuckle at the daily language hilarities of my 20-month-old instead of marveling at his height after a four-month interval, where I can drop off the kids at Dad's and go looking at wallpaper for an afternoon by myself - it's my husband's dream I cling to.

In his dream, we live in a state where our children can grow up, go to fine universities - and stay when they graduate! They won't have to leave, as we did, just to survive.

So I'll let my thoughts of a red shack on a depressing highway mingle with his shiny, white dream and paint for myself a rosy, pink future of never having to mourn the casualties of distance with my children and grandchildren.

(Burgetta Wheeler is assistant news editor.)

Feb. 22, 1996: Flirting before the first grade

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Her shoes shoved haphazardly into the purple bin, Sierra scurries to the remarkably high jungle-gym and climbs in, waving at me each time she reaches a window on her hidden journey to the big slide back down.

Their Happy Meals finished, Chris and Chris whoop and climb into the plastic balls as Sierra emerges from the slide looking slightly confused. But then her 3-year-old eyes find mine a few tables away and she giggles.

Mommy, however, is now the least interesting person at McDonald's. There are boys in the ball bin, and to the bin she goes.

She stops at the entrance and gives them a quizzical look. "What's your name, little girl?" asks one of the Chrisses, who appear to be about 5 years old.

What's your name, little girl? WHAT'S YOUR NAME, LITTLE GIRL?? I glance three tables down at the other mother, who appears to be there with Christopher, her son, and Chris, her son's friend. She keeps reading her paper.

"What's your name?" Christopher asks again. Sierra drops her chin to her chest, then raises her eyes to give him a look, but still she doesn't answer. If that were Jennifer and Jenny in that ocean of balls, she'd be swimming on in.

Just as I start to suggest that she tell them her name, a ball comes whizzing from the bin, missing its target but removing all doubt.

There is flirting going on here.

I can safely list that as Shock No. 371 on my list of things other mothers failed to mention when they were doling out that 14 tons of advice when I was pregnant. Shock No. 1 was that babies poop like a car backfiring when they're first born, shooting the contents of their newly opened bowels across the room if you and your new white nursing gown aren't in the line of fire to stop it. The fact that missing a square on a waffle while dispensing the syrup is a capital offense was No. 298.

I expected poop. I peripherally expected confrontations about breakfast food. What I didn't expect was that I would hyperventilate about boys before she was 10.

Yes, I'm reading too much into this, this play of innocent children. But then another ball goes flying; a cry rings out.

"Mommy! He hit me in the nose with a ball!" Sierra cries as she stumbles out to the table.

"Christopher, don't throw the balls," offers the other mom.

Sierra, who normally would wring a good 10 minutes of crying and comfort from a ball-in-the-nose incident, returns to the bin dry-eyed for more, um, interaction.

But she's still wary of these perfectly normal boys. She doesn't talk to them, she doesn't play with them. It's so unlike her. She can tell they're different from the girls her own age she's used to playing with, and she doesn't understand.

I can see her almost shrug when I tell her it's time to go, and for a change she doesn't cry. She's tired of trying to figure it out.

She heads inside the monstrosity for one more trip down the slide.

"Get your shoes, Sierra," I say as she steps out onto the cushy walk.

The Chrisses, who are sitting on the edge of the slide after following her down, look as if they've seen Santa Claus.

Their eyes wide, they turn and grin at each other.

"Her name is Sierra," says Chris.

"Si ... erraaaah," Christopher sighs, then swoons back onto the slide.

They collapse into giggles as Sierra rolls her eyes and grabs my hand to leave.

Heaven help me.

Burgetta Wheeler is assistant news editor at The News & Observer.

Sept. 29, 1995: Knowing the worst and coping

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Fatal.

Fatal.

"Of course, when it hits so young, it's fatal."

Fatal.

The world is spinning and I'm running, stumbling away from my doctor friend who doesn't realize when I casually mention spinal muscular atrophy that I don't know what it means. Until that one, eternal, nauseating moment on a Saturday in June, I continued to believe it was a generic label, meaning little for baby Kevin, as his mother, Cindy, had said.

But Cindy hadn't known, either. She was tired from excruciating months of tests, angry hours of waiting on doctors, fearful days of not knowing what was wrong with her baby. On that Friday, the doctors had mentioned spinal muscular atrophy but offered no clue as to what it meant. Four more days until Wednesday, when she would get the final diagnosis. Four long days of my already knowing what it was.

Every time I looked at my son over those four days, I cried, sometimes hysterically. How would Cindy go on? For minutes at a time, I could forget, but a sadness gnawed at my every thought, flowed out with my every breath. Then a kick to the stomach. I remembered:

My best friend's baby has a nerve disorder that likely will kill him while he's still young and soft and doe-eyed.

I kept remembering how Cindy and I had talked haltingly of another co-worker facing a similar tragedy, how we said we'd rather be shot than to have to watch a child die. We shook our heads, unable even to find words to articulate the pain that was caused only by our imaginations. It was, at the time, an unfathomable situation to us and, with tears in our eyes, we thanked God for allowing us to remain blissfully ignorant.

But now there's little bliss for Cindy. And certainly no ignorance of how it feels to be losing a child.

Mercifully untouched, I still can only shake my head -- and then marvel at the fact that not only has Cindy gone on, she's marched on fiercely. Where once there was only intense pain for her, there is now unflagging admiration.

Within 48 hours of the diagnosis, she was on the phone with other parents of children with SMA, finding out about the disease, what she would need, what she could expect. She'd had an hourlong discussion with Kevin's pediatrician about his role in Kevin's treatment plan.

She's called innumerable doctors, clinics and insurance people, fighting to see what coverage there is for the myriad equipment she'll need. Kevin's already in leg braces with more on the way, he has a scooter to help him get mobile and other treatments have been considered and thrown out.

But in planning for a future that will involve wheelchairs and ventilators, she's discovered that she'll have to move from her house with its sunken family room and carpeted floors. The scooter is only a source of frustration now because it won't go on the carpet. And the steps are a problem that can't be solved.

It's a house she's labored over for four years, recently painting it just the right butter-colored yellow. It's just the way she wants it. Now she has to leave.

After days of frantic searching, she's found the perfect ranch. Right price. Right location. No steps. And, remarkably, hardwoods under the carpets.

Now she needs someone to buy her house at 1426 Laughridge Drive in Cary.

There currently are hundreds of people wanting to move. Few have to move. Cindy has to move for the most torturous of reasons.

If you're looking for a house, please glance at hers. It's a two-for-one sale: You get a great house and a good feeling.

Burgetta Wheeler is a copy editor.

June 28, 1996: Weighty words can leave scars

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

'Have you lost weight?" used to be the two in the one-two punch that people inevitably would use to greet me if they hadn't seen me for a while.

Few would wait for the answer to "How ya been?" before trampling on my warped weight psyche with the second question.

"No," I would answer before I had indeed lost some weight, "I'm just not as fat as you remember."

How many times have I slunk back home feeling like my weight is the one quality that defines me? Who cares that I'm rearing two delightful children on less than five hours of sleep a night; that I've managed to wallpaper a crooked bathroom, in stripes no less; that I'm always the first to arrive with chicken pot pie when someone is in need?

If you're like me, you know that when you walk away, the first thing people discuss is not what a great person you are but how big your butt looks as it disappears around the corner.

This month, columnist Ellen Goodman wrote about how disturbing she finds the current anorexic chic among supermodels, and she cited the relationship between advertising and weight disorders among young women.

Although I am certain that such visual assaults have filled other normal-looking women with the desire to be less, it is the verbal wounds that have brought me to this place where my body is the enemy of my mind. I remember the boy in eighth-grade who took up half a yearbook page with his huge, curly musings about not being able to get around my behind in the hallway; the former girlfriend of a military boyfriend who sent him letters at boot camp, delightfully pointing out how my rear end was as wide as she was tall, in case he had missed that fact himself.

I did have a really great body, once, for about two weeks the summer before I turned 14. The barrel formerly known as my torso had somehow transformed itself into a recognizable female shape. Unfortunately, the fat grams from that year's birthday cake were the shot that started the decade-long stampede for my thighs.

An editor at Ms. magazine has said that weight is an underlying obsession of white women.

Me? Obsessed? Only if you call a bulimic stint in 11th grade (I only managed to make myself throw up twice), a bunless hot dog diet in 12th grade (some misguided notion about high-protein/low carbs) and a bladder infection that nearly wiped out a kidney because I didn't want to go to the doctor and face the scales an obsession.

Many people lay the blame at the plastic feet of Barbie, but I don't remember yearning for her 42-12-36 figure. Others will fault the glorification of the supermodels and of the naked and ubiquitous Demi Moore. Demi looks like a 12-year-old boy with strategically placed cantaloupes, if you ask me.

No, it's words that have done this to many women. It's your dad watching every bite of food you put in your mouth and telling you that you don't need it; it's your brother pinching your thigh and asking your husband how he can stand the sight of it; it's your size 4 friends and relatives always talking about how fat they are, leaving you to wonder, then, how disgusted they must be by your size 14.

It won't be the platoon of Barbies she owns that will chip away at the self-esteem of my daughter, who at 4 already receives uninvited comments about her shapeliness.

It will be the day she under-stands what "chubby" means that will be the impetus of the next generation's obsession.

For the sake of my daughter and yours, be aware of the weight of your words.

(Burgetta Eplin Wheeler is assistant news editor.)