Guess I've always been a rebel, taking matters into my own hands, not wanting to wait for some authority to show up even -- especially -- at my birth.
A birth story by Lilith Rogers
I dreamt I was writing. First I was writing in the sand at the river and then I was using seeds -- little marigold or maybe radish seeds -- to spell out the words in the dirt. The dirt was in a shallow wooden box, a seed bed, but the dirt, the soil, was too fine and it kept slipping out of a tiny hole in the corner of the box and my seed words were slipping out with it and becoming all jumbled. My words, my wonderful flower/vegetable seed words were slipping away out from under my hand.
What I was wanting to write about was my name. I realized maybe it was time to change my name again. Just as Lynn -- my given name -- given by my parents at birth -- my mother always loved to tell the story of my birth -- how she almost died having me -- not because it was a hard birth -- -oh no, it was so easy I was almost slipping out. My mother was in the hands of the nun nurses at the Catholic hospital across the street from my grandparents -- my mother's parents -- Ben and Anna Brown's house. But really it was Anna Brown's mother, my great-gramma, Gramma Hansen, who owned the house. Bought by her herself with money she earned taking in the laundry of her drunken Norwegien sailor husband August's drunken sailor friends. Because this house -- a wonderful little white frame house with a garden full of flowers and a white picket fence in front and an attic where we lived again when I was about four and was bravest of my brother Randy who was eighteen months younger and my sister Carolyn who was four years older and much bigger and generally tougher but not as brave as me as far as the dark was concerned. I was the one who was brave enough to climb the steep narrow attic staircase in the dark and turn on the light so we could go up to bed each night.
(Now I see why I loved that little house on Clark Street in Santa Rosa -- the one I was most recently kicked out of so they could sell it -- so much. The house I lived in for three years and wanted to stay in forever and be an old lady in and have the grandchildren come visit me in. It was a small frame house with a wide front porch, a front garden full of flowers -- planted by me -- with a white picket fence. And there was even a hospital only a few blocks away which was convenient when I fell down in the attic and broke my ankle. But all that comes much later.)
Meanwhile back at my birth, those nuns had to hold my mother's legs together, she always says, to keep me from slipping out before the doctor came. (Guess I've always been a rebel, taking matters in my own hands, not wanting to wait for some authority to show up even -- especially -- at my birth.) But finally the doctor did come and the nuns put an ether mask over my mom's face. "Why a pain killer when the pain was almost over?" you ask. Well, this was standard procedure, I suppose, at births in hospitals in Galveston, Texas in 1946 and probably in most other U.S. hospitals in 1946, too. (And thank goodness natural childbirth was back in style when I had my first baby twenty-five years later and home births were around for the last two.)
For some reason the ether came out as a liquid rather than a gas and trickled down my mother's throat and into her lungs and almost killed her she says. She coughed and choked as I came squirting, crying and gasping out of her and luckily my father, also a doctor, was there to help her and hold up her head so she could breathe and didn't die giving birth to me. But she almost died which is a fact, I think, she held against me my whole childhood -- maybe still -- and perhaps accounts for the distance there has always been between us. Because naturally she blames this near death experience on me -- a kind of original sin of mine -- and not on the arcane hospital procedures or the doctors whom everyone in those days believed could do no wrong. (Not like in the last century when so many women died giving birth in hospitals that they would hide when the time of their delivery was near.)
It didn't help our relationship either, of course, that after that traumatic birth and after my mother stopped nursing me after only a few weeks -- the doctor said she didn't have enough milk -- I was a colicky baby who gave her a great deal more trouble than Carolyn had. Or, speaking of Carolyn, maybe I was reacting instinctively to the resentment my older sister felt toward me from the beginning. This resentment was caused by, A, the fact that our father -- who was actually her step-father -- turned all his affection from her to me right after my appearance on the scene (an act he repeated seven years later when my sister Rozzie was born, but fortunately I was old enough to realize it wasn't the baby's fault that this happened and anyway his attentions were a little too intense to be welcomed by me by then; and B, the fact that she had been wanting and expecting a brother and told my mom to "take me back to the baby store right now and come back with the right baby this time," which my mother didn't succeed in doing until a whole eighteen months later and we have old movies showing my sister shoving me aside so she can get closer to my brother in his crib. And whenever we watch those movies everyone (but me) laughs and someone tells the story about the baby store so that's how I know she said it.
But I think I would have been a more compliant baby -- because I was a very compliant toddler and young girl and it wasn't until I left home for college at eighteen that my rebelliousness surfaced again -- if my mother had nursed me at her breast longer because all three of my own babies, who were fed nothing at all but breast milk for months and months, were fairly great sleepers. Well, except maybe Noah, my last baby and only boy, who often had to be given long baths and belly rubs and even sometimes car rides to ease him into sleep.
So back to my name. That morning in February, 1946, when my mother managed -- after almost dying -- to wake up from the fog induced by the ether and rouse herself enough to focus on me, was a propitious day. "What day is this, Gil?" she groggily asked my father who was still standing by and he -- being always up on the facts -- told her, "It's February 12th, Lincoln's Birthday, Betty." Now this was before Lincoln's birthday was a national holiday, before President's Day sales even, and down there in Texas -- an unregenerate Confederate state, people didn't think that highly of ol' Abe, the Great Emancipator, anyway (well, white people didn't at least) so everyone wouldn't have known it was his birthday but my father, being a fairly recent immigrant from the great state of New Jersey, did know.
"Lincoln's birthday, huh. Well, let's name her for him. Let's name her Lynn. And we can name her Ann, too, for my mother." My father agreed -- he was so happy to be a new daddy -- he was already thirty-one when I, his first born, came along and thirty-one was old to be having a first baby in those days, but it wasn't like he and my mom -- who was only twenty-two -- had been trying very hard because I came along only eleven months after they'd married which was only six weeks after they'd met in a dance hall down on 61st St. where my mom had gone to get out a bit after waiting a decent interval following her divorce from her first husband, Jack, and after little Carolyn had gotten old enough to stay with Gramma and Grampa for awhile. My dad was in Galveston because he'd joined the Merchant Marines to avoid the draft and they'd shipped him down there from New Jersey and he never got any closer to the war. Which was fine by all concerned, and he's been happy to do his best to become a Texan ever since.
So I was given the name Lynn Ann which struck one happy note to my birthing for my mother because they had previously agreed that, if I was a girl, I'd be called Ann Adele. Ann for Anna Brown and Adele for Adele Rogers -- my father's mother's name. My mother did not like her mother-in-law Adele Rogers. She was cold and difficult, a Yankee and a Jew -- both unknown quantities to my mother who was Texas born and bred and a WASP through and through although, since my grampa didn't believe in organized religion and my Gramma went along with whatever he said, my mom hadn't been to church much. (I know Rogers doesn't sound like much of a Jewish name and it wasn't my father's family name until fairly late in his life, but that's such a long story, I'll save it till later.) It came about as sheer coincidence, then, that my older sister was Carolyn and I was Lynn but later, when another girl was born, my mother named her Rosalyn to keep the alliteration going. Although we always called her Rozzie.
And lucky for me, too, that I was christened Lynn Ann because besides giving me a hero to learn about and emulate from an early age -- and someone I have a lot in common with, too since, as Aquarians we're both independent thinkers and fighters for social justice -- I didn't end up being named for someone my mother didn't like and wouldn't, therefore, remind her of this disagreable -- but fortunately far away -- mother-in-law every time she called my name. Although I did, in due time, come to remind her way too much of my father -- someone she also came to not like so much though she has remained married to him for over fifty years now.
At any rate, at this point in my story, at my birth, my parents were very happy with each other and with their little blue-eyed girl, Lynn Ann Rogers. I remember that once when I was in despair about some adolescent thing and went to her with it (something I rarely did) and she was sweet and comforting (she could be sweet and comforting sometimes and I need to remember that) she told me, "You know, Lynn, you were our love child."
She didn't mean "love child" as in born out of wedlock, as in "bastard" which is what that phrase usually signified and which was a terrible disgrace in 1946 -- not common like now -- like all three of my wonderful children -- born without the benefit of marriage, "illegitimate" each and every one and I'll challenge anyone to look them in the eye and tell them they're not legitimate people. (Of course, my parents would rather that their grandchildren had all been born within the confines of marriage and given legitimate names but we'll get to that later, too.) But anyway, my mom said, so tenderly, "Yes, you were our love child, conceived when your dad and I were so happy together and we wanted you so much.
"We were so happy that day you were born -- even though I did almost die having you."
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