Saturday, May 24, 2008

She's The One Who Looks Like Me. Only Prettier. And Filled With Light.


Today is Bob Dylan's sixty-seventh birthday but I'm not his mama and as such, I don't have a birth story to go along with with his special day but I am the mama of another child born on this day, thirty years ago. I believe I've written about the births of every one of my children except for my May's and today would be the day.
May was my second baby and I remember distinctly the moment I figured out I was pregnant with her. I was digging a ditch through the hard red clay on the property where her dad and brother and I were living, right here in Lloyd, about four miles down the road from where I live now. I was digging the ditch to lay a water line to run to my washing machine.
For some reason, it struck me as I dug that I was feeling a bit...pregnant.
I know that sounds vague, but I'd been pregnant enough already (besides being pregnant with Hank, I'd had a miscarriage before I got pregnant with May) to know the feeling and what it meant.
I don't think I stopped digging but just registered the feeling and went on with my digging. If indeed I was pregnant, the sooner we got that washing machine hooked up, the better.
We were living then in a 10 by 50 single-wide trailer and I was feeling proud of the fact that I had running water, which I had not had in the house we were living in before we moved the trailer onto our land. That house had been a lovely old thing and we paid the royal sum of seventy-five dollars a year to rent it (and that's not a misprint and I am not making it up) but like I said, it had no running water and it had no heat and it was hotter than an oven in summer and colder than an igloo in winter and the floors weren't level and you could see the outside from the inside inbetween the boards but I loved it anyway. We pumped water with a hand pump and hauled it in for cooking and drinking and we had an outhouse.
It was the outhouse that led to us moving to the trailer. One morning in the midst of a terrible hay fever attack I woke up and took my miserable self to the outhouse and while in there I got stung by a wasp at the exact same time I saw a snake at my feet. The resulting hysteria led to going trailer shopping that very day. Our plan had been to build a house on our property before we moved there but I could see that this house-building was going to take a while and frankly, I needed a bathroom.
By the time May was born, we were settled into the trailer quite nicely. It was small but I liked it as well as you could like a trailer. The bathroom was probably the biggest room in the house and that made me happy. Plus, we not only had running water, we had an air conditioner in the bedroom and if that wasn't living high on the hog, I don't know what is.
Two days before May was born I was in that bathroom in the early morning when my water broke. Yippie! I thought, the baby will be here soon! but as hard as I tried I could not get my contractions to start. I drank tea made of black cohosh which is about the nastiest-tasting substance on earth and took my nine-plus month pregnant self for a run down the dirt road but still no contractions.
By that afternoon I decided to give up the effort for awhile and laid down for a nap with instructions to my husband to watch Hank who was playing outside with his little Fisher Price farm. I had just gotten to the deep part of sleep when the man, in a state of great agitation, woke me to tell me that he couldn't find Hank.
That's a whole story in itself but he was finally found down the road, all the way across Highway 158 which is the same road I live on now, naked as a jaybird and accompanied by our two bull dogs. I promptly went into hysterics and carried him home, crying all the way, and that as much as anything probably got me really started in labor.
I labored all the next day with my midwife friends checking in on me and by dark, they came and settled in to stay the night. I am a slow, slow baby-haver.
My main midwife had another lady on "simmer" and she had to leave in the middle of the night to go deliver that baby and it was just as she was pulling up in her little VW Beetle at dawn that May started to make her appearance.
I can't say that her birth was easier than my first but the pushing-out part surely was. I don't think I pushed three times before her little body slid out and I was able to see who I'd been toting around inside for all those months. I'd honestly thought I was having a boy so it was with some surprise that I discovered she was a girl and I didn't have a name for her but I'd been thinking about "May" for some reason (uh? it WAS May) and my brave and hard-working midwife's name was Ellen so she was named May Ellen. We came to find out after we'd named her that her grandmother on her father's side was named May and her mother's name was Ellen, so there you go. Meant to be.
Now here's the funny thing: I had spent my entire pregnancy with May feeling huge amounts of guilt because I knew in my heart that there was no way I would ever be able to love any child the way I already loved Hank. Just wasn't possible. And so I thought she'd be born cheated and that thought gave me grave concern. But what I learned the second she was born was that the human heart (or at least the mother's human heart) is not limited in the amount of love it can hold and as soon as I saw her precious little face and held her in my arms, I realized that all of my worry had been completely for naught and that there was possibly no end to the amount of love I could have for my babies, even if I had fifty, which I was certainly sure I would never do. In fact, I was pretty sure I'd never have another baby at all, which is what I'd thought after the first one, too. And the third, but there again, that's another story.
So I fell in love with May on that just-dawning morning in May in a single-wide trailer in Jefferson County, that holy sort of mother love which is as close to heaven as I'll probably ever know. The midwives cleaned me up and changed my sheets and then they went off home to tend to their families and my friend Lynn brought Hank home because she'd taken him for me the day before because I'd known I couldn't concentrate on birthing this child with my first baby there to need my attention too. This was the very first time Hank and I had ever been separated for so long and I doubt I would have trusted anyone in the world to take him except for Lynn and I think Hank still remembers parts of that day and night, even though he wasn't yet two and they are good memories.
So there we were, reunited as a family, the four of us, and being only twenty-three, I felt pretty good for just having given birth and for having been up for about three days in a row. We loaded up the old '55 Buick Roadmaster and drove to town for a newborn check and no one at the doctor's office could believe I'd just had a baby.
Youth is great.
We drove home and I suppose we rested some that afternoon and I still remember what I cooked for dinner that night which was oven-barbequed chicken and potatoes from the garden. It was a delicious meal that we sat down together to eat, a father, a mother, a red-headed almost-two year old, and a brand, new baby at my breast.
A feast for the body and a feast for the soul and as with my first child, I felt reborn after the birth, almost as new and pure as she was. I was frankly amazed at how well everything had gone and even more astounded that I'd given birth to this beautiful child who looked so much like Hank when he'd been born that her father said, "Well, Mary, when we make a baby, I guess that's what it looks like," which cracked the midwives up. They still resemble each other which is odd because May looks enough like me to be my clone and Hank looks like his dad.
Genetics are crazy things.
Before I got pregnant with May I kept seeing a light out of the corner of my eye. It would come and then go and of course if that happened now I'd think I had a brain tumor but in those old hippie days, I just took it as a sign that a spirit was trying to "get in" and I still think that's true. May has always had an incredibly strong spirit and is as light-filled and purposeful as anyone you'll ever meet. At the age of sixteen she was hit by a car, walking to school and I still can't talk about that without crying. Frankly, it's a miracle she's alive but she is and she works on her feet and she walks all over Tallahassee and she, like the rest of my kids, is a dancer.
She's also a writer and one of these days, she'll start blogging too and then you'll see that what I'm saying is true.
She's strong and she's smart. This past year has been one of profound and positive change for her and I am standing in amazement, watching this process. As with all my children, she has been, since the moment of her birth, one of my best and most influential teachers and we probably spend at least an hour a day on the phone, discussing everything from books to meals, but mostly just making each other laugh. Besides looking like each other, we move alike, we sound alike and we think alike. We certainly share a sense of humor.
That girl has been a joy to me for thirty years now. She's tried me- don't get me wrong. When she was nineteen she announced that she was going to travel the country in her little truck all by herself and no matter how I tried to dissuade her, she just wouldn't stop making plans.
And she did it. She got in that little truck and drove off and left me crying. This was pre-cell phone days, too, and looking back, I don't know how I stopped myself from throwing my body under the wheels of the vehicle to stop her from leaving but she did fine. There are probably some things she never told me about her journey, but she's here, she's alive, and that light I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye shines now from her own eyes and every time I see them I feel the same joy I felt the day she was born.
Happy birthday, my darling.
Thank you for bringing that light to earth through me and sharing it.
You're a gorgeous, talented woman and it's a better world because you're in it.
And you taught me about the human heart and how much love it can hold which is a lesson that still, thirty years later, is as profound and true as it was the day you taught it to me, just by being born.
Tomorrow we'll all get together for shrimp salad and key lime pie and we'll celebrate you and the day you made your way here but it's today that I'm thinking about all of this, crying a little as I write it because I'm just so glad you're here.
And that I get to be your mama.
Amen.
Happy birthday.
Shine on.

9 comments:

  1. That was just amazing. :)

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  2. Happy Birthday, May! I remember 30 as a VERY GOOD year! :)

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  3. Too true, Juancho.
    Lo- I'll extend the message.

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  4. Beautiful, simply beautiful.

    Happy birthday, May!

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  5. Mama, you are light. You are my heart.
    Lopo- thank you! I have great hopes for my 30s.
    Juancho- thanks for pointing out that I AM amazing's middle name.

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  6. Oh May. I love you so much. My light-filled, pretty baby, all grown up, my daughter and my friend.

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