Barbara Majeski
speaker
129 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Barbara Majeski’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So much crazy goes on from this because at the end of the day, six months later, after getting that award, I got diagnosed with stage three colon cancer.
My newsfeed is hysterical right now with the memes and the, you know, it's all good. But at least it's done, you know.
It's true. I mean, you've got to find what, you know, what speaks to you and pick your team, like get your jersey on, get in the game. But, you know, some people are indifferent. They're not really affected by the ebbs and flows of politics. So I can understand there have been elections in my youth that I was very meh about. So this one was a little deeper for sure.
Amen.
Yes. So it looks like you've done your your homework. So I appreciate that. That's great. And yes, I grew up in New Jersey. And I'm one of two sets of twins. My my I have a twin brother, I have younger twin brothers. So we're one of two sets and my mom's a triplet. So it runs in the family now. God gives you, you can handle. And God made sure I just had three separate ones.
So I do not have twins.
three years i'm the older and i'm the oldest of the twin set which is very important in twin world and um the younger set is three years younger the interesting part is that both pregnancies they told my mother she was having one and two came out
Yeah, so twins run in our family as well as a condition known as fragile X, which is a lot like Down syndrome. It's a genetically inherited form of neurological impairment. And I always like refer to my childhood as growing up Schwartz because it was just so like chaotic and funny. But it was also during a time which special needs was more of like, you were kind of an outcast. You were shunned.
People were like, oh, I'm so sorry. The schools weren't...
very efficient with how to handle it they didn't even know what to do like now it's just light and day they from the get-go you're really taught a trade as opposed to back in the 80s the 70s 80s it was just like he was doing it was just not that great they had a special ed class but it wasn't as what it is today um but i would also think that that time of growing up when things were a little less when people were a little less empathetic especially kids younger kids
I can imagine. Yeah.
Well, there's just this crazy incident that happened when I was six. So I'm six. My twin brother and I are six. The younger set is three. And I'm giving the younger set a bath. Why a six-year-old is giving three-year-old twins a bath? This is the 1970s, everybody. So this is okay back then.
And I was like the mother's helper. And I felt like these were my little baby dolls and you only put the water six inches high, whatever. And I'm playing patty cake with Michael. And I, you know, I always preferred playing with Michael patty cake. Cause Steven is motor skills. Weren't there. Believe it or not. I can remember that.
But I turned to play patty cake with Steven and he was just laying on the side of the bathtub. And I didn't understand what was going on. I was like, Steven, let's play patty cake. And he was not responding. So I called downstairs and my mother came up, my father came up. It ended up being a big scene. What my brother had was a seizure.
So I took him out of the bath and ran him to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. I didn't see him again for almost two months. He ended up stop eating, he slipped into a coma, and I was just six years old waiting for somebody to bring home one of my baby dolls. The twins were mine. They were in my life. They belonged to me.
And before Stephen came home, my mother sat my twin brother and I down and she said, the good news is Stephen's coming home, but you have to be kind to him. He moves slower. And it was at that time they had realized that he had had neurological deficits. They realized in the 90s it was a genetic disorder, but until that point, they had felt that his delayed development was...
like due to incidents or we they didn't really know but the fragile x wasn't uncovered until the 90s so my mother says stephen will likely never be able to speak um and i remember saying and this is the serendipity of it i said i said i don't i'll speak for him i said he'll never need to speak i got it i got it like just bring him home
and i'll take care of him and you know as as crazy as that is it has definitely been um my my moral compass my okay i gotta redirect you know how do i get myself aligned with my purpose my calling and there's just been time and time again when i'm lost in the sauce and i'm very reflective of
giving a voice to Stephen, giving a voice to those who can't speak for themselves, using my gifts in service of others. So I think it very much shaped the decisions that I ultimately made, if that makes any sense.
You know, that's such a good question. And because it all does hinge on the fact that, you know, I knew, like, so I had gone on a...
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