Before Memory

My mother told me she cried the first time she saw me.

More than anything else in the world she wanted to be a mother.  She had always wanted to be a mother.  She was the oldest of eleven children and had had plenty of time to learn mothering skills.  Before she was ten years old she could bake bread.  She loved sewing for her little sisters.  When she graduated from high school she wondered what she would do next.  She decided to attend a nurses training program in a hospital school.  After that she attended a university where she met my father.  After graduating she accepted a job near where he lived several states away.  They married and began life together and she hoped to become a mother.  A year she waited, then another.  Finally, along I came, and she cried.

I wouldn't have understood then why she cried.  I was completely unaware that only one in a thousand births included my complication.  It wouldn't have mattered to me that it was not hereditary or caused by exposrue to substances my mother worked with as a nurse or any other reason that has been discovered through research.  But, to her credit, I never knew my mother cried until she told me when I was much much older.

Here is what I am told about my early years.

• When my first sister came along two years and several months later I took her bottle away from her and drank it.
• When my parents traded the pick-up truck in for a car I cried when they put me in the back seat because I thought I would be left behind.
• I hid the car keys in hopes that my dad wouldn't have to leave for work.  (He worked all week out of town).
• Sometimes I would fall asleep in the car where I would hide so my dad wouldn't leave without me.
• My parents chose an apartment because it had a fenced play-yard.  Soon I figured out how to escape (while my mom was keeping house or taking care of my sister) and I would walk to a nearby frosty and stand and look at people and they would buy me an icecream cone and that's when my mom would find me.
• I was always getting away and I would do things like crawl under a train that was stopped.  I do remember being told to NEVER crawl under a train -- even if it was not moving.
• When my mom was at work I tripped at the babysitter's and knocked out my front tooth.  My parents were not called and when I was picked up the bleeding had stopped so I wasn't taken to the dentist.  I was just two years old.  When the permanent tooth grew in it was discolored and misformed.
• I had pneumonia when I was four.  I called it "laughing fever" because I was told I got it from rolling in wet grass--which I loved doing.  I remember my dad playing a recording of Aida "to get well by".
• I went snooping in the detached garage and found my mother's wedding veil and completely ruined it by playing with it.
• I got my mom's iron out to iron something and left it face down on the linoleum in our rented house and went out to play.  It left a mark.  It's a good thing my mom found it before any more harm was done.
• I got into my mom's makeup and completely covered my sister in red lipstick.  I must have got some on me too as I recall enduring a good scrubbing.
• I "snacked" on plain crisco til my mom found me eating it.
• My sister and I made a complete mess of a batchelor neighbor's apartment while he was at work.  Two bear cubs on the lose couldn't have done more damage.  My mom had to clean it up and pay for the damages and apologize profusly.
• One time I had two dimes to spend.  I put them in the radio-flyer wagon and attached the wagon to my tricycle and began peddaling to town, listening the the happy jingle of the bouncing dimes.  I didn't know we lived ten miles from town on a ranch.  I got clear to the nearest neighbor's house.  Their dogs started barking and I started crying.  The lady at the house took me inside and gave me a bowl of icecream.  By now I had two sisters and the laudry room flooded all the time and my mom had to do  lots of water baling in the basement.  We had only one car so my mom couldn't come after me.  The lady gave me a ride home and my didn't I feel grand.