Beginning at the Beginning -- An Introduction
I remember my birth. No, really. I remember it and it continued to come to me in dreams. It was a dream in the way that other animals dream — no words, just images and feelings. The dream began with the “sparkly dark”. It was beautiful. If you were to hold a handful of blackberries and raspberries in your two cupped hands and somehow shine a light from behind the handful of berries, that was the sparkly dark.
The sparkly dark would last for a while and then suddenly be replaced by the “bright white”. It was jarring in its intensity. There was nothing to see except white, white, white. It was completely featureless. It glared, seeming to burn its way into me; relentless. And then it was gone. The dream would end.
The dream of the sparkly dark and the bright white came back over and over for quite a few years. I never quite understood it until I had my second baby.
Dr. Greenman had practiced medicine in Chester, California, in the Sierras for several more decades than I’d been on this earth. He was 81 years old when Jed was born, short and tending toward stoutness. If you went to visit him during office hours, you knew to bring something to read because he gave every patient so much time that the wait time for your appointment could be an hour or more. But then you got his full attention. He was wonderful. Even 18-month-old Seth loved him and called him Dot-ter Breen-mie.
On the night Jed was born, I was alone in what passed for a maternity ward in the 15 bed hospital in Chester. it was actually just a regular room that was designated for women in labor. When I first realized I was pregnant, I was terrified because my labor with Seth had lasted for 19 hours, and it was 19 hours of not knowing what the hell I was doing or what was supposed to happen except that there would be a baby at the end. So my sister Karin sent me a book on pregnancy and child birth, and I learned how to breathe and do circular belly massages. And that’s what I was doing. Alone. No dad or other family members around, but I was okay with that thanks to having read the all-important book. At somewhere around five in the morning, I rang for the nurse and told her I needed to push.
If you’ve never had a baby, you won’t know what “need to push” means. It’s the point at which, no matter how hard you try to suppress the urge, you have to bear down with every muscle in your entire core to try to get that baby out. You can’t stop it. Now, I’ve never been a screamer and I was very quiet throughout the earlier few hours, so the nurse started to argue with me. "Oh, honey," she said, "It can't possibly be time yet." “No,” I insisted, “I really have to push.” “All right,” she sighed, clearly humoring me. “Let me just get some gloves on and we’ll see.” About three minutes later, she was in full panic mode. “Oh, my god! You’re fully dilated! Just hold on. Hold on! Dr. Greenman isn’t even in the hospital.”
I guess I was supposed to have started screaming a while back so he’d have time to get dressed and get to the hospital. But the book didn’t cover that. So I instructed the nurse to give me some gas because without it I was going to push — hard. Why ask for gas? I knew that was the only anesthetic Dr. Greenman used for deliveries. She gave me the gas, which wasn’t really a gas, but rather a mask with a bit of ether dripped on to it. The mask was attached to my wrist by a chain, so that when I fell asleep, my hand would fall away from my face, thus self-limiting the amount I inhaled.
The next thing I knew, I was waking up and Jed was sliding out into Dr. Greenman’s hands and I was told I had a great big baby boy. He wasn’t kidding. Jed weighed in at 9 pounds, 4 ounces, which, by the way, was four ounces less than Seth had weighed at birth. There was no ultra-sound back then, so gender was supposed to be a surprise. It wasn’t a surprise to me, though. When Seth was about 16 months old, I went in to the tiny pantry that served as his bedroom to get him out of his crib after a nap. Just for a moment, I didn’t see Seth standing in the crib. Instead I saw a different little boy; a boy with big, loopy, light brown curls (Seth had straight, blonde hair). When Jed got to be that same age, he did in fact have big, loopy, light brown curls, which didn’t surprise me at all because I’d already seen him.
While Jed was cleaned and swaddled, Dr. Greenman had me push some more to expel the placenta, then asked if I wanted to see it. Groggy and blurry-eyed without my contact lenses, I said yes. And there it was. The sparkly dark, all purple and red, held in his hands; the large mass of blackberries and raspberries of my dream. Which meant that, yes, the bright white of the dreams was the glare of light striking infant eyes that were only used to the dark. So, when I tell you that I remember being born, you should probably believe me.
Do you see what just happened here? I started out with one simple story line and that led to a different story; one that was nevertheless attached to the first story. That’s the way memory works. Or at least, that’s the way my memory works. It jumps around, often unwilling to tell one story without telling another one. And that’s almost certainly the way this life story will go. It will be out of order. In a way, that matches my life anyway. I used to say that I seemed to be living my life in the wrong order. In the end, though it’s all somehow been in the right order and has turned out rather well. I’ve wandered along, usually just following someone else’s lead and somehow fallen into a fair number of small adventures. This life of mine has been so much more than I ever thought it would be when I was growing up, and I’m definitely not sorry about that — especially since I’ve survived it over and over.
My grandmother, who lived to be 84, once reminisced about all the change and life-altering events she had seen in her life. When she was a child, the streets around her house were still full of horse-drawn vehicles. A car was a rarity. She lived through the progression from horse-drawn to motor-driven vehicles; from little World War I fighter planes to jumbo jets; and from earthbound science to seeing men walk on the moon. She lived through two World Wars and the pandemic of 1918. I wish I had thought to ask her more about all of that. What were the details? What was your life like? How did you feel as it was all happening? So now, I'm writing this for my children, grandchildren, and even now a great-grandchild. Maybe they will want to know, too.
The sparkly dark would last for a while and then suddenly be replaced by the “bright white”. It was jarring in its intensity. There was nothing to see except white, white, white. It was completely featureless. It glared, seeming to burn its way into me; relentless. And then it was gone. The dream would end.
The dream of the sparkly dark and the bright white came back over and over for quite a few years. I never quite understood it until I had my second baby.
Dr. Greenman had practiced medicine in Chester, California, in the Sierras for several more decades than I’d been on this earth. He was 81 years old when Jed was born, short and tending toward stoutness. If you went to visit him during office hours, you knew to bring something to read because he gave every patient so much time that the wait time for your appointment could be an hour or more. But then you got his full attention. He was wonderful. Even 18-month-old Seth loved him and called him Dot-ter Breen-mie.
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| Me, pregnant with Seth in December 1970. The dark shadow on the bottom right is our dog Ezra. Seth was born a month later and two weeks late; all 9 pounds, 8 ounces of him. |
If you’ve never had a baby, you won’t know what “need to push” means. It’s the point at which, no matter how hard you try to suppress the urge, you have to bear down with every muscle in your entire core to try to get that baby out. You can’t stop it. Now, I’ve never been a screamer and I was very quiet throughout the earlier few hours, so the nurse started to argue with me. "Oh, honey," she said, "It can't possibly be time yet." “No,” I insisted, “I really have to push.” “All right,” she sighed, clearly humoring me. “Let me just get some gloves on and we’ll see.” About three minutes later, she was in full panic mode. “Oh, my god! You’re fully dilated! Just hold on. Hold on! Dr. Greenman isn’t even in the hospital.”
I guess I was supposed to have started screaming a while back so he’d have time to get dressed and get to the hospital. But the book didn’t cover that. So I instructed the nurse to give me some gas because without it I was going to push — hard. Why ask for gas? I knew that was the only anesthetic Dr. Greenman used for deliveries. She gave me the gas, which wasn’t really a gas, but rather a mask with a bit of ether dripped on to it. The mask was attached to my wrist by a chain, so that when I fell asleep, my hand would fall away from my face, thus self-limiting the amount I inhaled.
The next thing I knew, I was waking up and Jed was sliding out into Dr. Greenman’s hands and I was told I had a great big baby boy. He wasn’t kidding. Jed weighed in at 9 pounds, 4 ounces, which, by the way, was four ounces less than Seth had weighed at birth. There was no ultra-sound back then, so gender was supposed to be a surprise. It wasn’t a surprise to me, though. When Seth was about 16 months old, I went in to the tiny pantry that served as his bedroom to get him out of his crib after a nap. Just for a moment, I didn’t see Seth standing in the crib. Instead I saw a different little boy; a boy with big, loopy, light brown curls (Seth had straight, blonde hair). When Jed got to be that same age, he did in fact have big, loopy, light brown curls, which didn’t surprise me at all because I’d already seen him.
While Jed was cleaned and swaddled, Dr. Greenman had me push some more to expel the placenta, then asked if I wanted to see it. Groggy and blurry-eyed without my contact lenses, I said yes. And there it was. The sparkly dark, all purple and red, held in his hands; the large mass of blackberries and raspberries of my dream. Which meant that, yes, the bright white of the dreams was the glare of light striking infant eyes that were only used to the dark. So, when I tell you that I remember being born, you should probably believe me.
Do you see what just happened here? I started out with one simple story line and that led to a different story; one that was nevertheless attached to the first story. That’s the way memory works. Or at least, that’s the way my memory works. It jumps around, often unwilling to tell one story without telling another one. And that’s almost certainly the way this life story will go. It will be out of order. In a way, that matches my life anyway. I used to say that I seemed to be living my life in the wrong order. In the end, though it’s all somehow been in the right order and has turned out rather well. I’ve wandered along, usually just following someone else’s lead and somehow fallen into a fair number of small adventures. This life of mine has been so much more than I ever thought it would be when I was growing up, and I’m definitely not sorry about that — especially since I’ve survived it over and over.
My grandmother, who lived to be 84, once reminisced about all the change and life-altering events she had seen in her life. When she was a child, the streets around her house were still full of horse-drawn vehicles. A car was a rarity. She lived through the progression from horse-drawn to motor-driven vehicles; from little World War I fighter planes to jumbo jets; and from earthbound science to seeing men walk on the moon. She lived through two World Wars and the pandemic of 1918. I wish I had thought to ask her more about all of that. What were the details? What was your life like? How did you feel as it was all happening? So now, I'm writing this for my children, grandchildren, and even now a great-grandchild. Maybe they will want to know, too.
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