I arrived at Atlanta in the small hours of a Thursday morning, March 8, 1960 between a pair of ice storms still remembered by folks around here. Un-sedated for the event, she remembers it well.
Labor pains began like a backache, she said, eventually wrapping all the way round her. I tore her flesh poking the top of me into this world. That was the most painful part, she said. After the head came, the rest wasn't so bad, she says, though the whole ordeal lasted hours, a long concert of anxious discomfort punctuated with cycles of contractions, deep waves of pain in cymbal crescendos that ached to the bone.
No small creature, I passed through her pelvis just minutes away from my first breath on this planet. It sounds incredible; the pain for her unimaginable.
Toward the end of a pregnancy, you're ready for that child to be born, she said, tired of carrying a baby and ready to get on with it. Then comes the battle of birth and the victory that follows.
"There's a feeling of euphoria right after the baby comes," she said. "And then, when you see the baby, it's amazing that this little thing has come to you. It's just amazing."
The best and worst of it? I asked.
“The first thing you think is, 'I'm losing my beautiful body forever',” she smiled. “But if you have a husband who thinks you look good in maternity clothes, that helps,” she said. The worst part is diapers, she said. “But that's just a little while,” she laughed.
The best part? "Friendship with your children," she said. I think she meant after they are grown. But she found value in rearing them too: "You think you understand life from your own experience," she said. "When you have a child, you watch those things happen again to your own child, and that causes you to understand life better."
I can remember griping to my mother as a teenager, asking why in a liberated America men should face a military draft while women did not. By her reasoning, it was all fair. "Men go to war," she said. "Women have babies. That's the way the Good Lord fixed it."
At the time, I thought the ladies landed the lighter duty. I was an ignorant fool.
"Your mother passed through the shadow of death giving you life." I heard a preacher say that once. If Jesus laid down his life to get you safely into the next world, consider that your mother hazarded her own life getting you safely into this one.
Think on that some between now and Sunday. Sunday is Mother's Day you remember. Remember to celebrate the woman who got you here. |
|
