Why Mother's Day Matters

Remember how I went on a bender about how when babies are born, the range of weirdness in anyone's pregnancy falls within a narrow slice of probability, and the chances that things go poorly is really rare? Well, I was one of those. The following is the closest reconstruction of the events of my birth, as far as I can recall from various conversations with my parents over the years.

My folks, circa 1977.

I was born in the blizzard of 1978. I always said that the world knew I was coming and did what it could to stop me.

My parents had recently moved to the white, aluminum-sided mobile home at the northwest corner of the trailer park off of Summit Road, in Ravenna, Ohio, with my sister, who was about two and a half years old. My mother's pregnancy wasn't pleasant. As I grew inside her, she suffered some nasty gallbladder damage, and every time I got the chance, I'd ram my head or elbow or feet into the thing, exacerbating the pain she was already in. The damage caused made her throw up a lot and she had difficulty digesting fatty foods. Additionally, it caused some liver damage and she had difficulty absorbing iron, so she was kind of anemic and had nasty headaches. Her doctor prescribed her to drink buckets of red wine and eat liver to keep her iron levels up.

In the afternoon, on Saturday, January 21, 1978, the snow was pretty heavy, but the storm had not yet reached official blizzard conditions--that would come in a few days. But it was very cold, and a couple of days of snow and ice had packed around the car in the driveway. My mother, being very near her due date, said she wasn't feeling well and waddled down the paneled hallway to the bathroom, past the closet that contained the furnace and water heater. She didn't come out for a while.

After a few minutes, my father got up off the couch and went to check on her. There were drops of blood on the carpet, getting bigger the closer to the bathroom he got. When he opened the door, he found my mother swooning on the toilet--not passed out, but not all there. He made a quick phone call or two and then went out to start the car and cut the ice off of it.

At the hospital, the doctor quickly discovered that I was lodged in, breach, and had stretched out to the point that there was no hope of swinging me around. My feet were firmly planted on her hips and I wasn't moving. My mother's blood pressure had plummeted and all the damage I'd been working was getting worse. After a few hours of observation and attempts to stabilize everyone, they decided to do an emergency C-section and prepped for surgery. A few minutes later, the doctor comes out to give my father the news, and says,

Doc: "There's a chance that we could lose one of them--either your wife or the baby. If it comes down to it--"
Tom: "Save the mother."

Doc: "... what?"

Tom: "Save the mother. I've known her longer."

Approximately 45 minutes later, at 8:01 PM, under the Wolf Moon, I was born, bloody and messy, but well-formed. My father supposedly held me up by my ankle and spun me around, declaring that there wasn't a mark on me (I do not have any discernible birth marks or many freckles or moles). They sewed up my mother and got about the business of stabilizing her.

For the better part of the next month, my paternal grandmother, Minerva June Diroll (nee Lleyshawn), took good care of me in her warm house. My mother was hospitalized for a while and once she recovered from the C-section, they opened her back up and took out her gallbladder. She eventually recovered just fine, but has long-lasting GERD issues, indigestion and so on, which, it turns out, is hereditary and I have it, too.

Knowing that I nearly killed my mother on the way out was a defining characteristic in my life. I was reminded of it constantly, whenever my father would remind me that it is my job to take care of her, or when my mother would comment about what it was like, having to eat liver and onions all the time. The knowledge helped turn me into someone who is fiercely loyal to my friends, always looking for solutions to problems, and ways to help people from slipping over the edge when they're near it. When one of my family or friends are sick, I have been known to stand outside the door like some kind of marble statue, or to prepare massive feasts of recovery food, even things I hate to eat. Though my birthday is my most important holiday, I always celebrate it in honor of the pain my mother went through--it is a celebration of survival, and I call her every year.

I do this because I owe someone something, even if I can't be held to blame for the acts, as I was just a little meatball of twitching instincts, trapped in a rubbery flesh pocket, with no idea of what a gallbladder was, it is my form of Original Sin. So, to pay it back, I take care of my people. I hope you do, too.

Happy Mother's Day, Ma. I'm glad we still haven't killed each other.