Over the years, I've occasionally featured little essays on this blog called "Tales of My Mother" or "Tales of My Father" or "Tales of My Childhood" and so on. For today, I decided to pick out a Tale of My Mother to rerun here so I went back and started reading over them. Later today, I will post the one I selected but given what's in the news these days, it seemed appropriate to run just the beginning of Tales of My Mother #7, which originally ran here on 11/8/12. Here it is…
I was an only child. When that fact came up in conversation, I used to tell people, "My folks figured that if you get it right the first time, don't press your luck." The truth is that I was a very difficult birth. I was due on February 29, 1952 and my mother spent most of that day and all of March 1 in a hospital in agonizing pain, unable to deliver. Finally on March 2nd, they went in and got me. She was a month shy of 31 at the time and after I was out, the doctor who'd poked around inside her in order to deliver me told her, "Do not under any circumstances let yourself get pregnant again. You will never make it through another birth alive."
Her gynecologist later concurred. That little fact is always on my mind when I read debates about abortion and come across someone who believes they should be illegal with no exceptions. What would have probably happened if my mother had gotten pregnant again is that either she would have aborted or both she and that fetus would have died. The latter option doesn't sound particularly "pro-life" to me.
She told me more than once that if she had gotten in a "family way" then, she would not have hesitated to abort. The gamble that the doctors were wrong was not worth losing her life and leaving my father and me without her. As far as I know, it was never necessary. They were lucky…and also very careful. After my father died in '91, she asked me to clean out his drawer and not tell her about anything in there that I thought she wouldn't have wanted to know about. They had no secrets from each other but each had one small drawer in their bedroom which the other agreed to never open. I have not cleaned out hers yet though she told me once it held letters and photos of male friends who preceded my father. His had nothing I felt she'd care about but it did contain an awful lot of very old and unopened condoms.
Shortly after I posted the above here, I did get around to cleaning out my mother's "private" drawer. There were papers in there from and about a man to whom she was briefly married. That marriage was quickly annulled and then she married my father and they were inseparable and wildly happy with each other for the rest of his life.
There were no photos of any male except me. There was also a very old Bible — so old its binding had gone brittle and it could no longer hold the pages in place. And there were some photos of her mother and a $500 bill. The $500 bill would have been exciting had it not been from a game of Monopoly.