Thanks, everybody, for your wonderful birthday wishes!
Two years ago, when I hadn't been diarying for very long but was certainly obsessed about my birthday, I mentioned that on one�s birthday, in this family, the story of one's birth tends to get told. I didn't tell it that year, because it's usually told by the honoree's mother, and that was my first birthday without Shirl. Just yesterday, I realized that I had never gotten around to it. So here goes.
According to the legend, it was a very cold winter. There had been a lot of snow, and the temperatures were very low as mid-January approached. Shirl and Jack had been hoping for a December baby -- a nice little tax break -- but it was not to be. In fact, they had hoped for two children three years apart, and they were already a year and a half past that mark, too. Their daughter, the golden child who was born a year after the stillborn, was already four and a half.
They lived in the Bronx, in a ground-floor apartment of a five or six story building, a nice one on Morris Avenue near Fordham Road, with a center courtyard out front and one- and two-family private homes on the same block. Shirl's parents, Sam and Ida, lived upstairs on the third floor in the same building. Until about a year earlier, they had all lived together in a bigger apartment in the same building: Sam and Ida, Jack, Shirl and their baby, AND Shirl's brother, his wife, and their two daughters. (It must have been quite the sitcom.)The brother's wife's parents owned and lived in the single-family house next door.
I digress. The thing to remember, I suppose, is that Shirl, having once delivered an otherwise healthy and normal full-term baby who was stillborn (the umbilical cord came out first, but the top of it was looped around the baby's neck, something now that would be taken care of immediately by C-section) was more than normally agitated at the prospect of delivery. So, on the evening of January 11, when she began to notice something peculiar, she got concerned.
What she noticed, as they watched TV that evening on the Emerson console, was that her abdomen was getting rigid and then relaxing, almost as if she was having contractions. But she couldn't have been, because she felt no pain. No pain whatsoever. After keeping an eye on it for awhile and seeing that it seemed to be happening regularly, they called the doctor.
Dr. Levine actually had his office in the sub-ground floor of the building they lived in, or of another similar building on the same block. His office had been there before the war, and he came back to it when he came back from the service, having been with the Army in Europe. By a bizarre coincidence, he and my father had served in the same unit for awhile -- my father wasn�t from the Bronx, or even married to my mother when he joined the Army, and my grandparents didn�t even live there at that time anyway. Jack had once had to pull rank on the doctor to get something done, and they didn�t get along.
Dr. Levine was a g.p., so he delivered the babies and then took care of everyone in the family. He told Shirl that since she was having no pain it wasn't real labor, and that she could go to sleep.
Shirl woke up about 4:30 am realizing that the odd contracting of her abdomen was now happening every two minutes or so. They called the good doctor, who told them to hie themselves to Bronx Lebanon Hospital, which they did the minute Sam arrived from upstairs to look after the tot. Ida went with them to the hospital.
Jack let the two women out at the front door and went to park the car. He hurried upstairs to the maternity ward and was met at the elevator doors by a grinning Ida, who told him it was a girl. It was about twenty past five in the morning.
Shirl, in the meantime, had spent a few minutes in a hallway or labor room where, she always told me, the window was wide open to the January freeze. They wheeled her into delivery, where, as she went under, she remembered hearing the doctor say "It's a girl!", which confused her, because she was groggy, but sure she hadn't had the baby yet. Then she was knocked out -- the custom of the day -- and woke to see that it actually was a girl, a seven pound twelve ounce perfect me! She asked the doctor how he knew I was a girl before I was born, and he said that he and the nurse played a game and guessed the baby's sex just before birth, and that this time, he had been right.
She had no pain at all, either in labor or delivery. Ida had had her the same way.
We must have been in the hospital, the two of us, for at least a week, which was normal then. By that time, Shirl had one helluva bad cold, from the open window, she always believed. She didn't breastfeed -- god knows she could have, as she always mentioned at this point, and she wanted to but was talked out of it -- as that was also not common at the time, but even so, within a few days of coming home, I was good and sick myself.
[picture of us leaving the hospital]
Here�s the story about how they knew I was sick. I had been put down to sleep at some point and the Sibs snuck into the room to look at me and heard me crying. She climbed into the crib to comfort me, and was tickling my back -- something my parents always did to comfort us -- when my father came into the room, saw her in the crib with me, and freaked the hell out, picking her up and tossing her across the room onto her bed. This was a huge part of the telling of the story, as Jack, who clearly felt terrible and guilty about having done this, always insisted that he did not throw her, but had instead "pushed her with great venom." Anyway, when he checked back to see if I was all right, he discovered that I was in fact burning with fever. So, Go Sibs! If she hadn�t been in there with me, they might have just thought I was sleeping soundly instead of ... well, dead, I suppose.
Dr. Levine looked in on me several times a day, I believe. My fever went up to 104, I am told. At that point, the good doctor took my father aside and said that the only thing that could save me was a shot of penicillin, and that if I turned out to be allergic to it, it would kill me. Without it, I would probably not survive whatever it was I had. He didn't name it; it was pneumonia or bronchitis, probably. I was less than two weeks old. Jack always said that he didn�t like Levine personally, but that he knew that he was an outstanding doctor, and he trusted him. I got the shot. When I was a small child, the Sibs always liked to add at this point in the story that this needle was THIS BIG! (hands held about a foot apart)
The result stands -- well, types -- before you. I become the delightful **ahem** child whose antics have been delighting you all for years. Shirl spent the better part of the next year post-partumly depressed, and Ida moved in for awhile to take care of the Big Sibs as well as Little Baby Me. The amazing thing is that the full-time presence of Ida didn't trigger a depression in Jack, because he couldn't stand her.
So here I am, born 52 years ago in a January snowstorm. I did not inherit the wonderful ability to give birth without pain, and neither did the Sibs. My cousin did. I hope my daughters did, too.
Look for the Story of Shirl, coming next September to a diary near you.
