Today was my birthday and I started out feeling like the oldest baby in the world.
My first thoughts upon awakening this morning were of my mother, how she’d tell and re-tell the story of my birth, each and every year on my birthday, and how I miss her now. Once she woke me at 4:24 a.m., the exact time I was delivered, to whisper it in my ear. I turned seventeen that year and would graduate high school in the spring, and she thought I should get used to rude awakenings.
She was a remarkable woman, my mother. She let me nurse my own version of my birth for many years, a concoction of fact and imagination that became reality in my mind after so many tellings of my own.
It was a dark and stormy night, the stuff of so much fiction. But in fact, it was mid-November in southwestern Colorado, usually prone to interesting weather, and that year was no exception. Snow was falling at an ever-increasing rate, and my mother’s contractions were becoming alarmingly frequent.
My grandmother had taken the train from Cleveland to Denver the week before, where she joined my parents in their cramped cabin in the woods outside Pagosa Springs, Colorado. A city girl who had led a somewhat privileged life, my grandmother was at first concerned about my mother’s decision to follow her husband west to an unknowable future.
But grandma soon fell in love with the land and the culture as well. She had lost her own mother only a few weeks earlier, grieved briefly, attended to her mother’s affairs, and boarded a train to assist her oldest daughter with the birth of her first grandchild.
Grandma Marsie watched the weather nervously as her daughter grew more uncomfortable. Finally she could stand it no longer. “Jack,” she said, “we need to get LuraBelle to the doctor.”
My mother hated being called LuraBelle. Named for her fraternal aunt and her mother’s best friend, she thought it sounded silly and girly and old fashioned. She preferred “Lu” most of her life, and “Lura” at the end of it. But Lu definitely suited her. Down to earth. To the point. Strong and independent.
Grandma had been named for her own mother, Martha. She hated that name, and insisted on being called Marsie from a very young age. In fact, she’d kick people in the shins if they called her Martha. So why, I ask you, would my parents name me Martha?
My grandmother shared her story with me when I was six, and although I don’t recall kicking anyone in the shins, I was Marsie, and later Marsi, from that time on. But I digress.
Dad pulled the Jeep around, and he and grandma helped my mother into the back seat, where she could sit sideways. Dad drove and grandma rode shotgun, twisted around where she could see and soothe my mom.
They drove into town and dad pounded on the doctor’s door. But when he appeared, he was obviously stupid drunk. The nearest hospital was sixty miles to the west, in Durango. Dad knew what he had to do.
Those sixty miles are not a straight shot; there is a mountain in the way. So on that snowy, cold November night, my dad drove over Wolf Creek Pass in a Jeep, with his pregnant wife in the back and his mother-in-law sitting next to him, chewing her fingernails so her teeth wouldn’t chatter.
Somehow he made it. But this is where my own story took over, and in my mind, I was born in the back of a Jeep. It seemed romantic to me, an adventurous start to an unusual life. I told it so many times I believed it, and my mother never corrected me. I think she thought it was funny and harmless and so she usually ended her story of that night on the same note. We drove over the treacherous pass, we arrived at the hospital, I was born. End of story.
But it really wasn’t. And the truth, in my mature mind, is even more compelling. It speaks to the courage, the strength, the independence and the fortitude of the incredible woman who was my mother. On my last birthday with her, two years ago, she relayed the actual story.
When they arrived at the hospital, my mother was given a bed in the maternity ward. No private rooms then. A row of beds in a dimly lit hall with green walls. Labor was intense, but labored on and on. Dad and grandma were tired.
“Who knows when this kid is coming,” my mother said to them. “Go find a motel. They’ll call if anything happens. Might as well let SOMEBODY get some sleep tonight.” And they left.
They got a room at the Silver Spruce and went to bed. A few hours later, I was born. My mother and I were resting comfortably a few hours after that when my dad and my grandmother went to breakfast at a nearby cafe. They were feasting on bacon and eggs when a local radio broadcast from the front counter caught their attention.
“A baby girl was born at Mercy Hospital this morning to Jack and Lu Parker of Pagosa Springs…” My grandmother told my mom she never saw my dad move so fast in her life, before or since. He forgot to grab his hat. She did, and was right on his heels.
And that’s the true story. Mom said it had quit snowing, and outside a nearby window she watched the moon go down over one side of the San Juan mountains, and the sun come up on the other, as she held her baby girl in her arms, and felt the wonder and the power of a love that would last a lifetime. And she never felt alone.
