Junior League honoree keeps the family going while ... Praying for a miracle

By JoAnn Jones

news@vindy.com

GREENFORD

“Every week, there’s something wild that happens,” said Mary Therese Driscoll of Greenford. “When you have 14 kids, there’s always something that goes wrong.”

Like the time the family went on an impromptu trip to Niagara Falls and were stopped at the border.

“Are these all your kids?” the guard asked.

“No, we picked them up along the way,” the fifth-oldest, Molly, said.

Fortunately, Mary Therese’s husband, Tom, had thought to take all their birth certificates, because the guard asked them all to get out and prove they belonged to the Driscolls.

Tom and Mary Therese, who grew up in the same Catholic parish in Cleveland, have been married for 27 years; their oldest son Tom is 26, and their youngest son Ed is 6. In between are twins Bridget and Caitlyn, Erin, Molly, James, Rose, Mary Grace, Maureen, Caroline, Daniel, Claire and Annie.

Three have college degrees, four are in college and the youngest seven are still at home, attending Cardinal Mooney or St. Charles Catholic School.

And since January 2009, Tom has been in a coma, the result of a serious accident on Interstate 80 as he headed back to Manhattan where he worked during the week.

“The week before that, Erin had been in an accident, and her dad wanted to take care of everything, but she was fine,” Driscoll said. “I told someone that was the worst phone call I’d ever had. Little did I know …”

For the past two years, Driscoll has taken care of her children and her husband; run the T-shirt shop at Cardinal Mooney; driven mile after mile every day to get kids to soccer, basketball, cross country, speech and debate, and 4-H; and gone to Mass every day at 8:30 a.m. after her children are at school.

Juggling all those schedules while including her husband in all the family activities recently earned her recognition as one of Three Wonderful Women by the Junior League of Youngstown.

“Tom goes to daily Mass with me,” Driscoll said. “He goes to Cardinal Mooney to the T-shirt shop, and he sits at the table with me when I sell gift certificates every Tuesday at St. Charles.” She also makes sure he attends the children’s sporting events.

“He also goes to community Bible study with me,” she added, “and when we go to friends’ houses to eat. We don’t go to many restaurants, but we do go to the MVR [Mahoning Valley Restaurant] and the Caffe Capri.”

When at home, though, Driscoll relaxes by watching rented movies because television reception is bad where they live, and she refuses to pay for cable TV.

“I used to love reading,” she said, “but now I fall asleep.” She also added that music is very important during her down time — anything from the opening night of a symphony to alternative rock and country.

“It’s a saving grace,” she said.

To get around, the Driscolls have a 15-passenger van with handicapped accessibility as well as two older minivans. Seventeen-year-old Mary Grace helps with driving everyone around, while 15-year-old Maureen has her driver’s permit and will get her license in February.

Besides helping with driving and helping to keep the younger kids in line while Mom’s driving, Maureen helps around the house.

“I’m in charge of laundry,” she said. “I make sure they all have clean school clothes.”

In fact, Driscoll said, a job chart hangs in the kitchen, and in teams of two, the children are assigned a room of the house that they must keep clean. Twelve-year-old Daniel, she added, takes out the garbage because he is now the oldest male at home.

And all the children contribute to their father’s care.

“The children have learned to use the Hoyer Lift to move their father,” Driscoll said.

“They help him move and increase his range of motion. They also help with his medicines.”

Tom was recently in the hospital because he had trouble breathing, and when he came home, he had to be on oxygen for the first time.

“His being on oxygen raises the level of challenge for us,” Driscoll said. “But we’ll meet the challenge.”

Challenges have been a part of their everyday lives from having no hot water on occasion to being without electric for two weeks a few years before Tom’s accident.

“There was a windstorm, and for the first time in my life, I was home alone,” Driscoll said. “The whole family had gone to an Indians game. The electric went out, and it was just crazy. Tom didn’t go to work [in New York] for two weeks because he didn’t want to leave his kids alone without electricity.”

“We had to get water from a creek,” Driscoll added. “And we showered at the ‘Y’ in downtown Youngstown. People would bring us food and drop off water. We were so happy when the guys were fixing the electricity, we hugged them.”

Driscoll said people have been helping them ever since they moved to the Greenford area in 1996 when Caroline, now 14, was a baby. Tom had gotten a job offer from Butler Wick in Youngstown, and the family had wanted to move back to Ohio after living in Wisconsin, New Jersey and California.

“It’s good to move with a newborn,” Driscoll said. “We made a bit of a splash with 10 children, too. The Greenford community was welcoming. The school invited us to a big fundraiser right off the bat.”

While at Butler Wick, Tom had started testifying at trials as an expert witness, and soon people were urging him to go to law school. He attended the University of Akron at night to get his law degree. It took him two tries to pass the bar exam in Ohio, Driscoll said. In order to concentrate on the test the second time, however, for six weeks he went to live with a friend in Toledo. And when he passed, the family had a big party in their back yard.

“The party was supposed to be all about him,” Driscoll said. “But he bought me 25 roses for our anniversary.”

“When everyone came into the house to see the roses,” she said, “my husband dropped to his knees and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ I was so shocked. He had a ring on a pillow and we renewed our vows. Every single woman was crying, and the men were saying he was making them look bad.”

That fall of 2008, Driscoll said, they had the best Thanksgiving ever with all 14 kids home, including one from Europe and one from Japan. It was their best Christmas ever, too, she said.

But all that changed when Tom ended up in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital with all of his ribs broken and brain injuries that left him in the coma.

Yet, because of their tragedy, the Driscoll family has become much richer.

“Coolers of food and beverages were always at the hospital,” Driscoll said. “Bikers for Christ came to pray over Tom. St. Charles had a prayer service attended by so many people that I couldn’t even park.”

“At the prayer service, I asked the Father, ‘Where are my children?’” Driscoll said. “He said, ‘In your regular pew.’ I knew at that moment Tom was not going to die.”

Tom went to rehabilitation, and doctors were saying he really needed to go to a nursing home.

“I asked, ‘Why can’t I just take him home?’” Driscoll said. “People told the doctors, ‘You don’t know the family. Give them a chance.’ In June 2009, we brought him home.”

“The whole time Tom was in the hospital, hundreds and hundreds of people delivered dinner,” Driscoll said. “We had so much food, I had to ask them to cut it down to three times a week. It saved a lot of time, money and anxiety, though, when the kids had something to eat when they came home from school.”

“St. Charles had a fundraiser for us last March, the biggest one Youngstown ever had,” she said. “It went on for two days and every room in St. Charles was filled. Five thousand cupcakes were donated. It made us a lot of money.”

“We chose to live here in Youngstown,” she said, noting that was before the support the family had received. “We could have lived anywhere. But now I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

“I never question why [this happened]” she said. “This can’t be all there is in life. I was lucky growing up. I talked to the Virgin Mary all the time about being a mother. That’s why I go to Mass every day and receive communion. It gives me strength and patience to get through the day.”

Driscoll exhibits that strength and patience as she and her family pray for a miracle to bring their husband and father back to them.

“The children and I want people to know a miracle of this magnitude — God’s miracle to completely heal Tom — is possible not for us, but to glorify God,” Driscoll said.