Brenda Jones ’18 acts on a dream deferred
Brenda Jones ’18 had no plans to coast through her 40s. She’d already run a home-based bakery, homeschooled four children, managed the household solo while her husband, Steve Jones ’15, was deployed to Iraq with the Marine Corps, and took in her mother, who had lost her own home to foreclosure.
Slow down? She was just getting started. Jones began to reflect on dreams she’d set aside. What had she always wanted? To be a nurse — and to join the military. But at 42, she figured she was “too old and not smart enough.” That’s what she told herself, anyway.
Then, one day she accompanied Steve to the veterans services office at Holyoke Community College, where he was exploring a psychology degree. A nursing school diploma on the wall caught her eye. “I’ve always wanted to be a nurse,” she said offhandedly. The adviser replied, “You should do it.”
That was all the encouragement she needed. Jones started night and weekend classes to earn her associate degree in nursing at HCC, then transferred to Westfield State to complete her bachelor’s.
“I had some amazing professors [at HCC] who really wanted to see me be successful. That program gave me a solid foundation to build on.”
— Brenda Jones ’18
A few years later, with her nursing degree in hand and a job in the neonatal intensive care unit at Baystate Medical Center, she turned to her other dream: military service. She asked Steve if the idea was crazy. “I said, ‘Chase your dreams,’” he recalls. “You don’t want to reach your 60s with regrets.”
The maximum age to enlist in the Air Force Reserves as a nurse is 48, so, at 47, Jones had to move quickly. The recruiter was skeptical: Could she lose 30 pounds? Could she pass the duck walk — a required entrance test involving a deep squat and forward waddle?
Yes, and yes. Once Jones sets her mind to something, there’s no stopping her. She believes that both nursing and the Air Force were callings and draws inspiration from this quote from Florence Nightingale: “If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her.”
Dream job
Jones is the kind of person who takes in stray animals and shows up for friends in need. Always in motion, she hasn’t watched a Netflix series in — well, she can’t even remember. Most evenings, she’s outside on her 44-acre West Chesterfield farm, plucking weeds or tending to her 65 chickens, 30 rabbits, six quail, three goats, two silver pheasants, and several guinea hens they keep around for tick control.
Nursing taps into two of her strongest instincts: caring for others and staying busy. “I’ve always been drawn to things that are broken and being able to fix them,” she says.
It wasn’t an easy path. “Nursing school is so hard,” she says. “The tears are real. There were lots of them.” But Jones was invigorated by the level of support she received at HCC. “I had some amazing professors who really wanted to see me be successful. That program gave me a solid foundation to build on.”
In her training, she gravitated to neonatal intensive care. Every time Jones gets to work at Baystate, she scrubs in for a solid two minutes, and in those two minutes she mentally prepares for the newborns and families who will be under her care.
“I’m working with extremely sick infants, sometimes 24 or 25 weeks old, weighing only about a kilo,” Jones explains. “They are so small and fragile. Sometimes the parents have been through four rounds of IVF, and this baby is their last chance to have a family. Sometimes this is the parents’ sixth child, and they might have put the pregnancy in jeopardy with poor choices. I love them no matter what when they come in, and I give them all the best care and attention I can.”
“Brenda has true grit and dedication to her patients. She is always striving to improve her critical skills. She has such compassion and empathy for our fragile population and is a wonderful support to their families.”
— Shelli Gebo
Despite the intensity, she sees the NICU as a place of hope, not sadness:
“We’re helping these babies grow and thrive. I validate the parents and say, ‘This isn’t the birth story you expected, but we’re here for you. We’ll do everything we can.’”
Jones’ colleague, neonatal nurse Shelli Gebo, describes her as a welcome addition to the Baystate team. “Brenda has true grit and dedication to her patients,” Gebo says. “She is always striving to improve her critical skills. She has such compassion and empathy for our fragile population and is a wonderful support to their families.”
When days are especially challenging or emotional, Brenda uses her 59-minute drive home to decompress, turning off the radio to drive in silence. Still, she never views her job as drudgery.
“I’m in awe that I get to do this,” she says. “I love coming to work every day. And I annoy my co-workers by constantly telling them how much I love it.”
“Oh, yes,” Gebo says, “Brenda loves her job.”
Captain Jones
Deeply patriotic, Jones also loves the United States, and joining the Reserves allowed her to walk her talk. “I think our country is the best in the world,” she says. “Serving in the military gives you more of a respect for the people who put their lives on the line to protect it. It teaches you to put other people first. When I’m in uniform, I’m not caring about Captain Jones; I’m caring about the unit until it’s mission accomplished.”
That’s right — Jones is Captain Jones now. She received a direct commission as a captain, thanks to her nursing credentials. She completed officer training in Montgomery, Alabama, and later served a three-month deployment in Okinawa, Japan, where she continued to provide neonatal care at the Camp Foster Naval Hospital.
“Military families overseas need NICU care, too,” she says. “It was amazing to help families and care for babies in such a beautiful place. And it meant that I could give nurses a break who are stationed over there so they could come home and visit their own families.”
On monthly drill weekends, Jones trains at the Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee. Among the younger recruits, she’s affectionately known as “Mama Jones.” Military service runs in the Jones family. Her daughter, Cheyenne, is a first lieutenant in the Army Reserves, and her son, Joseph, is a staff sergeant in the Marines who just finished a three-year tour as a drill instructor.
“They all have to salute me,” Jones says with a wry smile. “It’s validating, because it hasn’t been easy.”
Jones proudly recalls administering the oath at Cheyenne’s commissioning ceremony. She also had the honor of serving as the promoting officer when Joseph advanced to staff sergeant in the Marines. “It was an aw moment — like one of those top 10 things that happen in life: getting married, having a baby,” she says.
Jones speaks with concern about the ongoing mental health crisis in the military, particularly the high rate of suicide among both veterans and active-duty service members. Her husband Steve has been candid about the PTSD symptoms he experienced several years after returning from Iraq, and both he and Jones have lost fellow service members to suicide.
In response, the couple founded the Warrior’s Art Room, a nonprofit art gallery and therapeutic space in Easthampton that offers art classes and a supportive community for veterans and their families. Including families was especially important to Jones.
“I know how hard it was to be a mother at home with three children while my husband was deployed to Iraq,” she says. “To the people in uniform, we always say, ‘Thank you for your service,’ but it’s the family members who are silently struggling at home. I wanted us to help take care of the families and the kids and partners.”
Since 2016, more than 1,500 individuals have participated in Warrior’s Art Room programming — some taking classes, others stopping by to talk, and still others using the gallery as a springboard to exhibit their work elsewhere.
“It’s not a bar; it’s a safe, clean place to connect,” Jones says. “Some people had never sold a painting because they didn’t think they were good enough, and this legitimizes them. Many have been in dark, lonely places, and it’s amazing to see them blossom.”
No age limit
As Jones trained to place an IV in the arm of a two-pound preemie or passed the duck walk test or traveled internationally for the first time, she also learned something about herself. “I have a lot of resilience,” she says. “I didn’t think I could do these kinds of things, but I did. I pushed through a lot of challenges.”
Her husband, on the other hand, was not surprised by her tenacity. “She’s a go-getter, and she’s so smart — and this just proves how smart she really is,” Steve says. “She’s not afraid to take a challenge and run with it. And she will keep at it. If there’s even a crack of daylight in a door, she’s going to keep pushing for it.”
At 51, with a full-time job, a military commission, grown children, grandchildren, and an admittedly “frenzied” schedule, Jones is more fulfilled than ever. And she wants to remind others that finding and serving your purpose doesn’t have an age limit.
A few months ago, Jones was at a gas station still dressed in her nursing scrubs. A woman passed and made a wistful remark similar to the one Jones had made in HCC’s advising office.
“She said, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a nurse,’” Jones recalls. “And I said, ‘Then do it! Just enroll in one class if that’s all you can do. You can do more than you think you can do. Just trust yourself.”
As for the future, Jones isn’t slowing down. “This is finally my own journey,” she says. “I’d like to serve in the military for as long as I can. And I want to be really good at the job I do now — be the best nurse I can be.”
