What if your child could never say “Momma” or your child could never say “Daddy”?
This candid and raw memoir hopes to help others survive adversity, to let them know they are not alone. To bring awareness of the lack of age-appropriate residential facilities close to home for our medically fragile population.
To date I have received positive testimonials from professionals. I shared my journey with a woman I recently met and her thoughtful observation moved me. She said tragic hardships come in many forms. Anyone experiencing helplessness and depression would benefit after reading my book. Another woman from Switzerland commented that our experiences were “international”.
My favorite quote :
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places. ---Ernest Hemingway
Book Reviews
August 8, 2019 Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Lucille's journey is a must read for all professionals
kghlongbeach
Waiting to Hear "Momma": A Mother's Memoir should be a mandatory read for everyone who works with individuals with disabilities and their families. Lucille Messina's honest journey jolted me into a realization that I never really "understood" what parents experienced despite my 35 years of working with similar families. The word "raw" describes her words as she shares, through intense emotional honesty, the roller coaster path her life became from the day her daughter was diagnosed at 4 months of age. One aspect that resonated with me was the significant impact that people, especially professionals, can have on one person. Lucille shares poignant stories of some professionals who helped her survive another day and yet other professionals who nearly pushed her to the brink of making a very dark decision. Parents would benefit from reading this book to help them realize they are not alone. Professionals should absorb Lucille's words to fully comprehend the impact of their actions on another human being. If you have not walked in Lucille's shoes, this book is a must read to develop the necessary empathy to work with individuals with disabilities and their loved ones.
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4-2019 Robert McGuire
Lucille Messina has removed the haze and the camouflage to bring the reader into the reality of having a child with multiple physical and cognitive limitations. Baring her heart and her soul, Lucille takes the reader into her life and shares the most intimate, the most delicate and the most vulnerable feelings. Her words enable the reader to have, not a “glimpse in the life” of a mother facing a world unable to bring her peace, but rather, the bare knuckle punch to the gut, that is the life of a family trying to understand, “why me?”, while at the same time, setting out to provide the most enriching and supportive environment possible.
Lucille’s courage and her husband Karl’s quiet but steady fortitude is on full display throughout the book. This story is a must read for everyone in our field so that a greater understanding of a family’s experiences, threats and disappointment will result in greater empathy and better supports for those families on this path in life.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Heart rendering account of a special Mother and child relationship
September 16, 2019
Slp
Format: Paperback
This is a touching, emotional story that is so well written and comprehensively describes the day to day struggles and joys of being a parent to a special needs child. Lucille has captured the highs and lows of daily trials and tribulations in a loving and honest way. Good for her for having the courage to put the emotions on paper and for sharing her story with the world. A must read for everyone.
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October 11, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kindle Edition - “There for the grace of God go I.”
In the memoir “Waiting to Hear Momma,” author Lucille Messina takes the reader on a gritty and vivid journey into her life as primary caretaker of her medically fragile daughter Jacklyn, her “special child,” as she refers to her. There are passages where the author resorts to war-like imagery to illustrate the constant and unrelenting struggles she (and her husband) endure to provide the best life possible for Jacklyn. The author writes, "How callous and cruel to find myself in another fight to survive. I knew the disease and knew how to counterattack that assault. There wasn't an unknown entity attacking me-only those in charge, who had not walked in my shoes. I was tired, so very tired, and I thought, Will I have enough strength to march forward and defeat yet another enemy? ...so tomorrow would be another day and another skirmish in my never-ending wars." This passage, and the memoir more broadly, reminded me of Eugene Sledge’s WWII memoir, “With the Old Breed,” in which he transports the reader into the realm of combat few of us experience or can imagine. In the Vietnam War, we Marines distinguished the grimy pit in which we were caught from “the world” that existed everywhere else. Ensnared in a narrow and absurd corner of life, we saw no clear exit, other than being hauled away in a body bag. The experience was so isolating and narrowly focused, it twisted your identity until you became an unrecognizable version of yourself.
Lucille Messina’s portrait of her daily struggle, her valiant battle to help and understand her special daughter Jacklyn, is an experience only faintly and vaguely familiar to most of us. The author’s struggle, the pathos, her dependence on the smallest signs from Jacklyn–a smile, her "grrrr" vocalization–to sustain her, matches the mindset of a soldier who, rendered numb as he walks off the killing fields, notices and covets the brilliant blue sky or the flight of a bird to feel human and touch once more some lost part of himself.
“Waiting to Hear Momma” is a touching and wrenching account of a wife and husband’s search to find “normal” for themselves and their special daughter in a life filled with endless cycles of medical emergencies, hope, prayers, isolation and doubt. It is a book that pushes the reader emotionally to the brink, a memoir that earns the moniker, “There for the grace of God go I.”
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October 12, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars
Paperback - Amazon
Amcbash
Honest account of raising a medically fragile child
Waiting to Hear "Momma" is an honest, raw and revealing account of what life is like for families raising medically fragile children and children with disabilities. The author expertly weaves her memories that expose the emotional and social aspects of raising a chid with disabilities. As a parent to a child with disabilities myself, I appreciated the raw honesty of feelings expressed in this memoir. Highly recommended to all professionals in the medical field who have medically fragile patients as well as to families who are in a similar situation or those who would like to fully understand this experience.
