Heike and Emily

 In the days when I called myself a Christian, I often repeated the mantra, “God never gives you more than you can handle.”  In a life that has always seemed to have more than its shares of major stressors, the main evidence that it may be true is my amazing daughter.

She came into our lives almost two years to the date from when I lost my first child, a son we named Nicholas Michael.  Because of Nicholas’ death, I was treated as an at risk pregnancy the second time, which in those days meant that I had to spend the end of the second trimester and most of the third trimester in bed.  1988 was one of the hottest summers ever, and I spent most of it in our air conditioned bedroom.

The nursery had been set up two years earlier.  The walls were painted sky blue and there were sheep jumping over clouds around the room.  Dennis’ childhood dresser and my favorite bamboo bookcase had been painted white.  The brass crib my parents had bought was set up with a mobile hanging over it, and the changing table was stocked with two year old baby powder and lotion.  The blue and yellow curtains, sheets, and lampshades had long been given to charity, and blue newborn sized diapers had long been removed.  The room door was always closed now.  By the beginning of September, there were still no pretty dresses on tiny hangers.  The bassinette my nieces had slept in during their first three months on this earth was parked in my in-laws’ living room with some very tentative plans about going down to the fabric store in Getty’s Square to pick out white eyelet skirt fabric for it.  Also in the back of my mind was some gorgeous pink flowered fabric I had seen somewhere that I would make into curtains and a quilt if I made it to 36 weeks.

I did make it to 36 weeks, in fact, I made it to 40 and a half weeks.  Every day starting a week before my due date, Dennis drove me to his parents’ house about a mile from the hospital, where I then spent the day waiting to go into labor.  I had told everyone that I would have no problem driving the mile to the hospital when it happened. Then on a warm Tuesday in October, at about 2 pm, I called my sister in law.  All I could muster to say into the phone was a strained, “Andrea!!!”.  The response was, “You can’t drive, can you???”  Three hours and 14 minutes later, Emily Taressa came into the world.  Her 8lb. 12 oz. body on my belly just moments after birth was truly the most comforting thing I had ever felt in my life. 


At one point, a nurse came into my room and said, “Mrs. Schulz, your baby girl has violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor – we’ve never had one like that before!”.  From that day, Emily has been the greatest source of pride and pleasure in my life. 

I knew from the start that I would never have the welcoming hug my grandmother had, or the total altruism that my sister has for her kids.  I knew I would never have the level of patience my sister-in-law had, or the energy and drive my own mother had.  The only thing I had was my love and passion for this beautiful bundle of happiness.

 Right from the start, Emily pretty much raised herself.  She slept through most of the night almost immediately.  When I had to go back to work for a few months when she was only 12 weeks old, she switched to a bottle during the day but was happy to return to nursing at night and in the morning. She would wake up cooing and playing with her toes, trying to grab at her mobile, or jibber-jabbering at Spanky, our 23 lb. cat who had taken to sleeping in her crib.  One morning, when she was six months old, she woke up crying.  I called the pediatrician, who told me “Babies cry.”  I told her, “Not this one,” and took her in.  That day, she was diagnosed with her first ear infection.

 That’s pretty much how it’s been for me as a mom:  Emily told me what she wanted, and I supplied what I could of what she needed to make it happen – then she did the rest:   She wanted to ride horses and be in shows – we bought the horse and took her to lessons, and she won the ribbons.  She wanted to play the oboe – we bought the instrument and took her to lessons, and she ended up on stage with the Pittsburgh Symphony at Heinz Hall.  She wanted to go to the University of Florida to become a journalist, I supported her in moving back to Florida without me (“Mom, I promise to go to the doctor, get my teeth cleaned, have my eyes checked, wear sunscreen, and bring water wherever I go.”) and she ended up being editor-in-chief of The Alligator.  She wanted to work on a liberal paper in a hip city, I drove with her the 4,300 miles from Gainesville to Portland the day after graduation – and she is flourishing.

So far, being a mom is one of the easiest things I’ve ever done because of an intelligent, beautiful, kind, hard-working, talented, determined, independent young woman, the love of my life, my pride, my joy…my Emily.

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Heike Schulz is a mom and special education teacher in a public middle school in Pittsburgh, where she lives with her three giant rescued dogs and a 21 year old cat. She and Donna met on Facebook through Donna’s cousin and Heike’s lifelong friend, Gary Guzzo.

Bronx Memories

The following post is by my friend Heike Fuggetta

As someone who feels awkward in social situations, I’ve been abundantly blessed with long term friends.  I recently started playing Words with Friends at the behest of someone I’ve been sort of peripherally in touch with who is a friend of my cousin’s.  Each time I take a turn, I indulge in memories associated with her.

In 1961, at the tender age of 8, my mother, father, and I moved to the United States from Hamburg, Germany.  My dad’s family lived in East Germany, with the exception of one sister-in-law and niece, my grandmother had passed away, and my grandfather remarried.  The house I had thus far grown up in had been sold to developers who were building high-rise apartment buildings on our land.  So, off we were to join my mother’s siblings’ families and the families of several of their lifelong friends in the U.S.

The difficulty of that move, for an eight year old with no siblings, is another story entirely.  Today, I want to focus on the memories associated with my WWF (Words With Friends) partner.

When we first arrived in New York, we moved in with my godmother and her family which, at that time, consisted of my aunt, my uncle, their two daughters, and their son.  They lived in what seemed to me to be a huge apartment in a building just off Mosholu Parkway.  My WWF partner lived with her dad  on an upper floor of a building that, while perhaps  not pre-war, still had a dumbwaiter by which the trash was collected each evening.


 Our belongings, which we had packed in huge crates, were not to arrive for several weeks (things went by ship in those days), so my more than generous aunt had bought me several outfits of shorts and short sleeved tops to wear in, what seemed to be unbearable heat, that first August in NYC.  My teenaged cousins dragged me around with them everywhere they went that summer, retrospectively most assuredly at the behest of the adults in the family.  This woman, by whose classic early sixties American looks I was totally awed, was there too.

She was there the day that my aunt and mother had been watching a Million Dollar Movie in the early afternoon which was miraculously playing at their friend’s house when we got there in the late afternoon.  The explanation I received from my cousins was that the time zone changed at Mosholu Parkway, and it was now an hour earlier than where their home  was.

Another of my most vivid memories involves sitting on the steps of their building, as we did in the Bronx in the summer, feeling just a little nauseous from the heat but appreciating the beautiful and colorful new shorts outfit from Alexander’s department store and holding my first Barbie doll, which my oldest cousin had bought me from Woolworth’s, thinking that this might not be the worst life in the world for an only child from Hamburg - when a bird flying above took a shit on my leg.

And that about sums up my life in America.


Heike Schulz is a mom and special education teacher in a public middle school in Pittsburgh, where she lives with her three giant rescued dogs and a 21 year old cat. She and Donna met on Facebook through Donna’s cousin and Heike’s lifelong friend, Gary Guzzo.