My mother did not have an easy life , she grew up in Texas and had one child at the age of 15 and in those days it was unheard of to have a baby out of wedlock she did marry her son's father and later divorced . She lived with her mother Pearl Holland working to help support them and raise her son till age 11. While she was at work one day she meet my now grandmother and my mother was soon introduced to my father Robert Swadley who was at that time serving in the Navy and in the Vietnam war, they wrote letters back and forth, and he came to meet my mother, long story short , they married soon after meeting , My mothers mom pearl soon after this would pass away and this hurt my mother a lot. My mother had never left Texas and now she was on a plane to Main to meet with her new husband and they would start a life together, after two years they had me (rhonda) in 1975 , soon they would be re stationed off to Washington state, in 1976 they would have another daughter Carla . Soon after this my mother began to have some mental problems and severe depression she was soon diagnosed as Bi-Polar. My brother now age 15 was helping watch us girls and also trying live teenage life. Now when my mother was pregnant with my sister Carla she was running from her neighbors yard to answer a phone she tripped over a small garden fence and bruised her leg bad, this would eventually lead to awful fate for her. We soon moved again this time to east coast again.  This is around the time my mother found out she had a tumor and they tried to removed but it spread throughout her leg and hip(from the fall). She ended up with bone cancer and her choice was to have her leg removed or die. I was age six and my sister only five . Later in life she told me it was not an easy choice and if she had to do again she would have chosen to die . She chose to have it amputated and live. This makes her not only brave but strongest person I will ever know , she then went many years transferring from base to base and no help from family or even friends ,my father never was home and when he was he was drinking. My mother could not use a fake leg she was using crutches. needless to say she did not have an easy road , and she was in and out of hospitals for having Bi-polar and in constant pain from what they call phantom pain. Later my dad would stop drinking and retired from the navy they moved back to home state Texas . My mother ended up having 15 grandchildren and one great grandchild. She did not get to see her grandchildren from my brothers side , and she hardly saw her grandchildren from my sisters side. But even so she did love them and talked about them with stories she had with the,.She did however spend much time with her other grandchildren. She did not have a glamorous life, but she did have hard one, with many test and obstacles and many which she could handle and could not. This however mad her who she was, she never lied ..I never saw a lie from her, she was kind to anyone who gave her a chance, she also had mean streak if you messed with her, she could hold onto the past but yet she was still forgiving . She had the biggest heart and just a wonderful person . Do not get me wrong my Mother shared many happy stories to her life as well, the one thing she loved was her children and she always made sure when we was kids we had something to do , she was master of finding free things to do to have fun.