Memory

Twenty-Three: A Healthy Baby–Any Kind Would Do

/ Gerry Wilson / 16 Comments

The day after the baby shower (see Twenty-Two: Death and Life), I went to the hospital, but the labor stopped, I went to sleep, and my poor mother waited all night to see what would happen. My husband was on call at his hospital. He was in his third year of medical school–the first clinical year where the students were actually on call like real medical staff. The following morning, the doctor decided to induce labor. I was terrified and elated.

Oh, how I had wanted this child. I had prayed for a boy. Feeling guilty about that request, I’d prayed for “just a healthy baby, any kind would do.”

Once he was born, I didn’t know what to do with him. I had never been around little babies. I’d never babysat. I was clueless, except for having read Dr. Spock, but reading a book isn’t quite like holding the real thing in your arms. The grandmothers came and stayed for a week each. My mother’s first night with us–our first night home from the hospital–she lay awake while the baby slept from eleven until about five in the morning. Yes, he slept that long, but she didn’t, afraid to close her eyes for fear that he’d stop breathing!

After the grandmas left, Baby and I were alone much of the time. It was fall, so that meant going out with the stroller on beautiful days, and that’s the way I lulled him to sleep sometimes. During the crying times, because all days and nights were not like that first one when the poor exhausted baby fooled us into thinking he would be a good sleeper, I would walk and walk and cry along with him.

I would be a stay-at-home mom. It’s what I was meant to be: wife and mother. Meanwhile, my husband’s every-other-night-on-call routine continued. He was good with the baby when he was around. He just wasn’t around very much.

He was a beautiful baby, my oldest son. Here is proof:

Here we are!
Yawn.
How cute is this?
Six months. Bottomless pit.

 

Can you pinpoint a time when your identity changed, not necessarily of your own doing?

This is # 23 in the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge hosted by Jane Ann McLachlan.

Twenty-Two: Death and Life

/ Gerry Wilson / 17 Comments

Three things marked this year of my life. Right around the time of my twenty-second birthday in September, my father-in-law died of a head injury sustained in the auto accident I described earlier.

In November, John Kennedy was killed in Dallas. I remember where I was when I heard the news (as most of us who remember that day at all must surely do). I was working in the engineering office at Bellsouth when someone came in and told us. I was devastated, stunned. John Kennedy and his beautiful wife represented a new era. Camelot and all that. And then, he was gone.

I remember staying glued to the television for days. I cried as though I’d lost a close friend. What was it about a young man as President that so captured our imaginations?

A few months later, my husband and I had big news of our own. I remember when we told my parents I was pregnant. They had come to visit us, and we had just found out. I’d gotten highlights in my hair for the first time, and my mother kept talking about how pretty I looked. I remember what I was wearing when we went out to dinner with them that night–a slim, white wool skirt and a matching white sweater. I did feel pretty, a little magical, and in awe of what was happening to me.

We were nervous about telling them, though. We’d only been married eight months, and I had my job, and two more years of medical school loomed. But when we told them, my mother said, “I knew it!” She said I had that “glow.”

Here I am in a photo just days before the baby came. I wasn’t very big at all.

Baby shower

Yes, it’s a baby shower. A gloriously happy time, right, in spite of that awful plaid dress. But notice the triangle of people in the picture. I’m opening baby gifts. The young man in the coat and tie is my husband. Does he look simply detached, or ready to bolt?  And that’s my mother, looking a little askance. I don’t believe she was quite ready to be a grandmother, but oh, she did love my babies.

That child made his entrance into the world two days after my twenty-third birthday. You’ll meet him in the next post.

Are we ever grown up enough to be parents? Or do we grow along with our children?

Twenty-one: All Grown Up

/ Gerry Wilson / 12 Comments

Engaged!

At Christmas break during my senior year in college, I was given an engagement ring. It’s what we did back then. If you didn’t get a ring at Christmas, your entire future clouded over. Well, I got my ring from the blue-eyed boy, who had graduated in three years and two summers and gone on to medical school.

So I was spending my senior year “alone,” except for occasional sanctioned dates with a fraternity brother of his who escorted me to parties. Medical school didn’t leave a lot of time for traveling the three hours back to campus to see me, and it seemed that when he did come (I think of him as just a boy then; we were both so young, so young), I would romanticize the time we’d spend together, and he would be exhausted from the study-grind of a first-year med student. Often, we argued, because my expectations far exceeded the reality.

And yet we planned a wedding. I graduated in May. We were married the end of June.

Daughter to Wife

Many girls of that generation went straight from daddy’s house to husband’s, from being daughter to being wife.

There were signs I should have recognized. The night before the wedding, after the rehearsal dinner, we fought. I chalked it up to pre-wedding jitters. Deep down, I think I knew something was fundamentally wrong, but I closed my mind to it. We went through with the wedding. It rained that day. My grandmother shook her head and said rain on your wedding day was a bad sign. Maybe she was right.

The finishing touch. Notice the curly bangs (humidity).

A Dose of Reality

We had been married two weeks when my young husband’s parents were seriously injured in an automobile accident. My husband had just started his summer job in a lab at the medical center, and I had a job with the telephone company in an engineering office where I learned to write specifications for new telephone installations. (Yes, with English and psychology majors, that was where I wound up. It was considered a fine job for a young woman fresh out of college.)

We dropped everything and went to Nashville where his parents were hospitalized, and we spent much of the summer traveling back and forth. We didn’t have a lot of time to settle in as newlyweds, and we had been married about three months when my father-in-law died. He was forty-eight years old. My husband’s mother recovered, but it was a long, slow process. In the fall, my husband went back to school for his second year, which wasn’t quite as hard as the first. I went on with my “plum” job at the phone company that paid me about half as much as my male counterparts.

So that was my introduction to marriage and to deep loss, almost simultaneously.

The Little Junk-store House

I should add that we loved our first apartment in a duplex on St. Mary Street.  We had furnished it with junk store finds. That little place is still vivid in my mind: the dark paneled walls, built-in bookcases, hardwood floors, big windows in the living room that let in lots of light, a rather primitive kitchen (which didn’t matter because I–almost literally–couldn’t boil water!), a sunny bedroom, and a tiny room that could become a nursery.

We were happy there.

Where were you at twenty-one? Were you settling down, or striking out on an adventure?

We are closing in on the end of the twenty-five memoir posts in the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge. Just a few more to go . . . I wouldn’t have thought it possible! Thanks for sparking the memories, Jane Ann McLachlan.