As I was typing this entry, my mother called me to remind me about this story.
“In two hours, it will be twenty-four years since …” she said.
When my mother went to the hospital to give birth to me, after not nine but ten months of me in her womb, she was more than ready to evict me from her young uterus. Of course, I would finally decide to come on a day when the small Illinois town in which I was born already had two feet of snow on the ground. She and my father piled into his old Mustang and made their way.
Because fate did not seem to be pulling for her, my mother’s doctor was not only out of town, but out of the country. To make matters worse, when she came in, they immediately rolled her next to a lady she describes as large and in charge. She was what my mother, generally polite, referred to as a lady of great mass. The Lady of Great Mass whined and whined about her heartburn.
My mom says she considered flanking her in the face with a syringe or IV pole. After all, she was dealing with a baby that was a month overdue and a doctor that ran off to Europe. The last thing she needed to listen to was the Lady of Great Mass scream about her heartburn. She went on and on about how the barbecue sandwich she had eaten for lunch was apparently ravaging her insides. She wouldn’t give it up.
The wait was long in the room where my Mom was seated, and soon the moans of the Lady of Great Mass became unbearable. She was screaming that the heartburn had moved to her back. My mom noted that her contractions felt the same.
Then a light bulb went off in minds of those in the room. Was she pregnant? No, the lady had remarked. She wasn’t pregnant. Surely, she would know if she was pregnant. Perhaps she was newly pregnant? It was all the barbecue’s fault, after all. You know how that barbecue is, she kept mumbling.
