October 22, 2014
Dear Mom,
It’s my birthday. I’m
fifty-three years old today. (You would
be seventy-nine if you were still around.)
We would have celebrated this: the way I beat the odds, and continue to
do so. We would have celebrated because
I was never supposed to be born. I was
never supposed to survive. And I was
never supposed to be who and what I am now: a functional and mostly happy human
being.
Fifty-three years ago today, you are tucked into a bed at
UCLA Hospital wondering what the hell is holding me up. Your water had broken the night before, and
there had been a mad scramble in the apartment to get my older half-siblings to
babysitters or grandparents, a hot pan of sizzling fried chicken shoved into
the refrigerator (my dad’s favorite story about still being freaked out at the
birth of his fifth child), and get you safely delivered to the hospital. It all worked out, as those things do, and
then without warning, the womb and I simply stop our little dance and go
back to sleep. The nurses tell you,
“Just use this chance to get a good night’s sleep,” and maybe you do, or maybe
you are too uncomfortable, or maybe, because UCLA is a teaching hospital and
you are one of their prize guinea pigs, you spend the night tossing and turning
in between a variety of tests and monitoring nurses.
A year before this, you’d gone to a Catholic hospital to ask
about some spotting, and gotten two unexpected diagnoses: first, you were pregnant, and second, you had
uterine cancer. Without telling you, doctors
gave you an abortion; when you came out of the recovery room, they wanted to
discuss treatment for the cancer. You
protested; they asserted you could never have carried the baby to term, and now
that you would probably never be able to conceive again anyway, their recommendation
was that you have a hysterectomy.
You walked out. I’ll
never know exactly what was going through your head at that moment, but I do
know that it was an extremely stubborn head.
So it’s no surprise to me that within a few months you were, again,
pregnant and had agreed to be part of a study at UCLA Hospital in exchange for
free prenatal care and delivery. It is a bit of a surprise that despite
cancer, smoking, drinking, caring for two older children and working full-time,
you still managed to carry me a full nine months, but then, we come from a long
long line of tenacious survivors.
At any rate, it is now the morning of October 22nd,
1961, and you wake up to a world going to hell in a hand basket while you are
trying to kick-start your fourth child’s birth.
There is the “Berlin Crisis” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union,
which starts today over something trivial and, by my first birthday, turns into
the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is the
Haiti “election” in which Duvalier is elected unanimously by having his name
and only his name printed on the ballot.
There is Chubby Checker, performing his hit “The Twist” on the Ed
Sullivan Show and shooting his song back up
to #1 for an unprecedented second time.
Craziness everywhere. Did you
know today is also the birthday of Franz Listz?
Of Timothy Leary? Annette
Funicello? Curly? And if you did, did you care? Being a Hollywood kid, you might know about
Annette Funicello. Pretty sure Curly isn’t
on your radar. You and I share the same
sense of humor, and it does not include slapstick.
So you wait all day.
My father is in and out of the hospital waiting room, using this
opportunity to skip work and visit a few bars, engage in pre-celebration
drinks. I imagine it’s a long day for
you, full of examinations by interns and nurses, questions and interrupted
naps. Eventually, everyone gives up
hoping that labor will begin again on its own, and you are given the drugs to
induce contractions.
Somewhere around 5 p.m., I make my appearance, entering a
room full of students, nurses, physicians, lights, cameras, action.
“I could feel your body coming out,” you told me once, “I
could feel your shoulders, your little ribs, as you passed through.” I’ve always remembered that. I like knowing you were conscious, aware,
there for me despite all the technology and students.
I am average weight for babies of that day and age – about
six and a half pounds – and I seem perfectly healthy, despite your health
issues. And yes, I have dimples, but not
much hair. “Another girl!” my father
groans, when he sees me.
You're happy, though.
You’d lost an eighteen-month old daughter a few years earlier,
brown-eyed and dark-haired. A love
child. Maybe you think I am Jenny
come back to you.
So there I am, the baby who was never supposed to be
born. Your last baby before the
hysterectomy, squeaking into this world by the skin of my teeth. As for my father’s side of the family, nearly
genocided out of existence, my birth was also kind of miraculous. Sixty-one years before my birth, California
Indians were at the bottom of a population crash that was almost our
ending. My grandfather and father were part of a resurgence that had no name, no direction, no
manifesto. All they knew was that they
wanted to live. They chased after life
with desperate abandon. They would each leave some of that story for me to trace back.
I came into this world with five sisters already there, and
a brother. Yet I was the only child you
and my father ever had together. My
birth order is a paradox: youngest of six half-siblings for ten years (until a
younger half-brother came along), and yet, an only child. I’ve never really been sure where I belong in
this family of halves and steps.
That Sunday in October 1961, neither you nor I could see what was ahead. I’m sure you
were just glad that we’d both made it through labor and delivery. Maybe you're worried about affording
diapers and food and rent. Maybe you are concerned about fitting into your pre-baby clothes (you’d hung onto that
amazing figure through the previous three babies). Maybe you are angry at my father for getting
drunk.
Surely, you don’t have a clue that in three more years your
family will be separated, broken up, by violence and grief, prison and fear,
your own bad decisions, your husband’s cruelty.
No, we never see what’s coming, especially when what’s coming is the
unthinkable.
I’m glad that you don’t know any of that, on October 22,
1961. I imagine you receiving visitors,
flowers, filling out the birth certificate, bargaining with my father that
naming me after the movie starlet Debra Paget was acceptable only if “we spell
it right.” (I wish I could ask you now,
where did you get my middle name, Ann?
Didn’t you have a best friend downstairs in the apartments named
Ann? Why did I never hear anything about
her ever again?) I imagine you having a
quiet moment after everyone finally leaves you alone; you bring me to your
breast to nurse. It is a rare
moment of just us. Thank you for
that.
And thank you for stubbornly, crazily deciding you wanted me
to be born. Thank you for carrying me in
your body for nine months. I know now
that mothering is the kind of job no one can prepare for, no one is ready for,
and no one can do perfectly. I know that
not everyone is capable of handling the intensity that comes with raising another human
being, that some of us aren’t even done raising ourselves yet. I know that childhood is a ferocious crucible
that even “perfect” mothers can’t protect their children from, and I know that
there is no such thing as a perfect mother, and I know that mothering was a
role you took an entire adult lifetime to grow into.
Just when you got it down, cancer came back and took
you. I was forty years old. I’m writing to you now across thirteen years
of absence, across three thousand miles, across the birth of my first
grandchild. I want to tell you, I
know. I understand.
I want to tell you that when I speak the word mother, I mean the doorway through which
I entered this world, a doorway you chose to hold open long enough for me to
scrape through. I want to tell you that
when I say birth, there is a
gratitude for which I have no language, no word, no metaphor.
I want to tell you that October 22nd will always
be our day, the day you brought me
into the light, the risk, the possibility, of all that is amazing.
It’s my birthday today.
I’m fifty-three years old. I was
never supposed to be born. Every day,
every year, is our victory, Mom.
Love,
Deby
i love you
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