Memoir 1—Birth Day
The best story my Mother ever told may have been a lie, a
partial fabrication or the truth as she remembered it. It was the story of my birth, and I was 57 years
old and she was pushing 90. Within
months, she died, and I would be left wondering about what stories, facts or
lies would help me frame my life up to the point of her death.
We talked in a hot bright sunroom of the cottage that she
and my Dad shared in an old folks’ development in South Florida. It was the end
of a road, my parents’ personal Oz, which began in the Midwest during the
Depression.
Mom had the air of a secret Santa giving an unexpected gift. She was the star of the show and knew her
audience of one was paying attention.
I was born at 6 a.m. Dec. 13, 1952 in Broward General
Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The
doctor arrived too late to administer anesthesia. Pain, which Mom handled with drama in later
life until her death when she showed courage, was an old wives’ tale designed
to keep younger women from handling the cataclysmic miracle of childbirth. No air conditioning and window curtains moved
slowly in a breeze.
“You were a gentle child,” she said with a farm wife’s
practicality. (Act or truth?) “You could be knocked over with a feather.”
Within days, Dad, a pilot who stayed in the Naval Reserve
after World War Two, left for a long trip to Morocco.
The stories associated with my two sisters’ births carried a
different tone: My grandmother wrote a
letter to an aunt detailing the middle sister’s entrance to this world, saying
that it was uneventful and babysitting me required patience. The story is that Dad gave Mom an aquamarine
ring at my birth and a dishwasher when my sister was born.
Five years later, according to family lore, my youngest
sister was born on New Year’s Eve after a bumpy ride over railroad tracks to
induce labor so Dad could take a tax refund for the year.
Neither sister stayed in South Florida for the 35 year walk down
the yellow-brick road to the old folks’ home. Both listened to my versions of
my parents’ dramas. My own fabrications, lies and truths must have reflected
the increasing disorder of lives when small details that color a story—trips to
the grocery store, lack of calls from old friends—became insurmountable
distractions to the telling of tales.
Is it time for each of my sons to know how he entered the
world? A good storyteller needs a good
ending and playing Secret Santa, telling stories, lies or truths are tidy ways
to close journeys or lives.
These clean endings, of course, may satisfy the performer--
who needs a place to stop and rest--but the reader or listener, who lives
between the lines, is always left with a different story
