Being Born
((October 7, 1947) (Non-fiction))
It is the
big unseen, “Woops,” there I am. Someone
says, “It is time now,” and mother pushes and tugs and clutches
onto the bed railings.
As I come out of
her womb, I hear an echo, far in the background, “It is your time now.”
Who said it I don’t
know. There is some bloodshed in leaving
this nearly one year cocoon, cozy as it was, to enter these enormously larger
surroundings. There are of course several moments child and mother collide, a
series of little and final evictions, the nurse and the doctors are there
watching all this, ready to sign the birth certificate, and asking what the
name will be, one to christen this new being, being born, in this primitive
savage way.
I am sure many have
written on this subject, spoken on it, much better than I, I seek in brief only
to recap it, perhaps for myself. I was born because my mother met and exercised
the act of passion with a man called my father, a different father than my
brother’s father, but that is neither here nor there, I was born at 4:00 a.m.,
in the morning at St. Joseph’s Hospital, in Minnesota, October 7, 1947. In my case, my father left before I was
named, before the certificate was even rolled out of the doctor’s drawer, whereupon
the nurse tried to grab me and replace me with a stillborn baby, so another
family might have a live infant, but no dice, my mother saw the scheme, and
stopped it. You see she heard, “It’s a boy!” You don’t say that to a stillborn
child; and then she never heard another word—and that provoked suspicion, and
the other family wanted a boy, and so she kept her eyes half open, demanded: “Bring my boy to me!”
You don’t think
things, happen that way, but they do.
Her first baby,
some two years earlier, was a boy also, my brother of course, now she had
potatoes and carrots. That is, my brother always liked potatoes; I on the other
hand, had bright red hair, carrot hair, plus I liked carrots. My brother was
christened on the spot. It doesn’t
matter how it all began, it all turned out okay—that’s what matters: we were a
family, but I wonder whatever happened to that other family, —the two who
almost made three, who had the stillborn? I couldn’t say, nor wish to try but
perhaps they had better luck thereafter, I hope so, and I hold no grudges.
#894
(3-30-2012)
