2
It was the weekend of November 20, 1976. My mother and father had
separated a year and a half earlier and she had settled into a two
story town house apartment a couple towns away from home. The bottom
level was a large open living room/dining room area with the kitchen
as a large alcove behind the stairs. I had fallen into watching the
weekend evening news, perhaps to feel a sense of my father as, had I
been living at home at the time, that's what would have been on the
television. My mother was in the dining section where she had set-up
the ironing board to iron some clothes but was, as it turned out,
listening even though she was not watching. The broadcast ended with
a small segment about the upcoming anniversary of the John F. Kennedy
assassination and after it ended I turned off the T.V.. As she
continued, she stared at the ironing while she told me the story of
my birth, ''What you have to understand is...
'On the day JFK was assassinated, people did strange things,' she
explained. 'People were stunned, a mother would forget to feed her
baby all day, fathers came home early from work.' While the news had
come too late in the day for school to let out early on the east
coast, class had pretty much unraveled as the news leaked out; the
children came home in a pall, even if they didn't know the details of
the news at the time. My parents had the news coverage on the T.V.
and all were heart broken as the details unrolled over the next few
hours. First JFK had been shot, but was alive, then news that he
arrived at the hospital. Then there were reports that he was dead.
Then news of the Vice President being sworn in on the plane.
By the time the final details of that afternoon and night had rolled
out, all were exhausted and emotionally shattered. My mom and dad
shepherded my siblings to bed and then retired to their bedroom as
well. Mom dropped to sit on the bed and started crying. Dad tried
to console her by sitting next to her with a hug. Then a kiss. Then
a longer kiss... And a little bit later I was conceived.
My mother had been appalled by where dad had taken things, but she
was too tired to fight him off. And even though they normally used
protection as they were strict practitioners of family planning, my
mother consoled herself that, being in her late thirties, she was too
old to get pregnant. In fact, when she missed her next period, she
went to the doctor expecting to hear the news that she had entered
menopause.
Instead he concluded that she was pregnant and my mother panicked.
In the days of the early nineteen sixties, there were no ultrasound
machines or other devices that could view the embryo and determine
the age of the baby. Instead the doctor would simply ask the woman
when she thought the child had been conceived and would plan out nine
months from that for the due date. Mother shuttered as she realized
exactly when I had been conceived and couldn't possibly tell the
doctor that. ''October 22nd,'' she told him as she raced to come-up
with a different date, any different date, so the doctor
wouldn't know of my parents 'shame' the night JFK had been killed.
With that date given to him, the doctor noted my expected due date of
July 22, 1964.
As abortion was illegal in New England at the time, my mother decided
to lose the pregnancy by, as I came to label it, 'poor prenatal
nutrition.' When that was unsuccessful, she finally had to explain
to people that she was, in fact, pregnant and even came to believe
that the due date would be the 22nd of July, after all that's what
the doctor had said. By the time Summer rolled around, she had
concluded that it would be nice to have a child with a birth date so
close to her own and was finally looking forward to having another
kid. And July 22, 1964 came... and July 22, 1964 passed. Yet as
due dates were estimates anyhow, this was not something in itself to
worry about. But a week afterwards, the doctors started to
become concerned and asked mother if she was sure about the date of
conception. Suddenly, mother realized why I wasn't being born in
late July, but once again she couldn't tell the doctors the actual
conception date without revealing that she had been lying to everyone
all this time. So she stuck with the October story and the doctors
concluded that they had to induce labor by early August if I wasn't
born before then.
And I wasn't.
Knowing that I shouldn't be due until late August, mother convinced
them to wait until the beginning of the next week, but then there was
no choice and they took her to the hospital. Back then, my mother
said, the common anesthesia in rural New England was still the ether
cone, a system where ether was poured onto gauze or a sponge
inside an upside down metal cone. This cone was then placed over the
mouth and nose of the patient and the ether fumes would put them into
a daze or to sleep. This is how they anesthetized my mother as part
of inducing labor she told me, though drowsy, she was not out. After
labor was induced, they found that I was not yet in the heads-down
position and came out one foot at a time. The staff struggled to get
me out and by the time they did, I had been strangled to death by the
umbilical cord... That was my mother's last memory.
The anesthesiologist had been so involved by the drama of the doctors
trying to resuscitate me that he didn't notice my mother had gotten
an ether overdose and slipped away. Once they revived me, they
chucked me aside and worked to resuscitate my mother. They succeeded
in reviving her though she didn't come to her senses until she was in
the hospital bed to recover, her last memory being the doctors saying
I was dead. And yet, when my mother awoke, here in the arms of my
sister was this undead creature, wriggling about and making noises.
This was when my mother truly freaked out!
Oh, for those keeping count: Being conceived, Not miscarrying,
Being born dead, Not staying that way.
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