When you are old and gray...

Today, my oldest daughter turned 20. She is shown here with her cousin, my brother's boy, Will, and our aged bitch-cat, Cleopatra Jones. Driving today to pay for the birthday party and prezzies, I thought about that day, so long ago, when I was 26 and she not yet at all...

This beautiful girl was due on a Saturday in late January, 1987. I was tired of the whole "bring forth life" thing and even though I didn't have to go to work, I set out for town early. Everything was ready for the baby and deep inside my heart, I was as prepared as a girl can be for her life to be irrevocably altered.

One of my best friends had a daughter born a bare 18 months before Jessica. That child, too, made a late arrival, only deciding to be born after my friend built a hard half mile of barbed wire fence, ending up with gratfeul labor pains and blisters on her hands.

Traveling to town on the day Jessica was due, I turned around on the dirt road leading to my house to change a flat tire on a car owned by an elderly couple I knew. They are both dead now but the man, obviously of the old school, was appalled when he found out later that I helped change his tire when (so he thought) I should have been sitting on the couch. But babies don't get born, I have found, when Mama sits on the couch.

With nothing happening despite my work, I walked five miles, rode my motorcycle and thought about fishing even though it was hardly the right time of year. Nothing. No baby. At the end of the day, I was pleasantly exhausted by all my efforts.

Childbirth has never been easy for the women in my family. My grandmother had trouble going into labor with my mother. My mother labored over 72 hours with me. In the end, Jessica was only prompted into the light by maximum doses of Pitocin. My scheduled battle with the essence of life began at 7:00 am on February 5, 1987.

Childbirth is something they don't tell you about at work or in basketball practice. I also found that it is something that you can't go back on, no matter how bad you wish you could. I suppose I should say that I wanted to have my first child in a natural environment, without drugs and with some kind of classical music playing softly in a dimly lit room. Not so. I never wanted any of that. Breathing was done to keep me alive and I had no interest in studying it for use in the hospital. In fact, even though repeatedly advised to breathe by an annoying nurse who I threatened several times to kill, I held my breath as often as I could catch it, grinding my teeth against the curse of life until the lights in my head went dim.

That night was the longest of my life. I have yet to understand what a miracle birth is although I do understand a woman's urgent and immediate desire to be a man. LOL. After the PO Lortab, the IV Demerol and finally the epidural, I guess I became humble. Or maybe I was fucked up and simply ready to meet my fate, even if that included death. My baby doctor was an old school fellow who believed that babies will come when babies will come and c-sections are way overused. He watched monitors, told me stuff about bad readings that I didn't understand and clucked repeatedly. I actually liked that doctor but that night I wished wholeheartedly that he would die.

By morning, I had learned what it was like to no longer be human. When I could think, I longed only for darkness and some measure of control over my world. Despite my stern instructions that the child's father not be allowed into the room, he was there. That shit wouldn't happen these days.

And so Jessica was born, at almost 7:00 in the morning. Davenport stood nearby as his daughter saw the light, passing out dead onto the floor and causing all the hovering medical staff, paid in cold hard cash in advance by me and me only, to cast amused glances at his worthlessness. My doctor noted that it was President Ronald Reagan's birthday, assuring me that we could "turn" the baby.

By evening a few days later, my strapping Jessica (7 pounds, 9 oz and 22 inches long) was tucked into a hand-made wooden cradle in the middle of my living room. I breathed a sigh of relief when she drifted off around 8:00 pm, nodding into snooze myself, deceptively thinking that life might right itself. Her strident cries woke me at midnight and, from three days of age, she reveled in the night as if it was her Goddess-given element. For the next five years, she would seek darkness over light. A temporary reprieve and puberty rekindled her love of that time when working people are asleep.

I am a sister to every other woman on the planet. I have been a soldier, my blood spilled on the ground for life and love. It all seems far away now, the removed pain of beginnings. School is important, now that I am old and gray, as is Jessica's choice in men and her treatment of my car. But tonight, just for a moment, I thought of the night she was born, 20 years ago....