The Beginning

The Beginning

My mother states that my beginning came about by Acquaintance Rape. (It is interesting how she ended up having two other children with him.)

My mother has also stated that my birth defects were the doing of the same man who threw her down a flight of stairs while she was pregnant. There were no other facts shared by my mother regarding the pregnancy, except to say that at birth I was so weak that the doctors had to break the water bag and pull me out with forceps.

Everything seemed to go along as usual until at about five months old, I turned blue while I was crying and then my eyes rolled up into my head and I lost consciousness. I have to say that although I had much deserved anger regarding my mother and the way she had, or had not, raised me and the events that followed, I have to honestly give her props for the care that she and my godmother, Dolores, took care of me.

I was my mother’s third child and I realize it could not have been easy, regardless of how we all came to this situation. At that time, my mother shared an apartment in San Francisco with her best friend Dolores and Dolores’s mother Nellie.

Six months before I was born, Dolores had had a baby boy that only lived five days. My mother, Dolores, and Nellie took constant care of me. I was not allowed to cry. The three of them would take turns holding me. I would be rocked to sleep and held until I awoke. They were so worried that I would wake up and cry that they would just lie still while I slept, instead of putting me in my bed. When I had a spell, turned blue, my mother would stimulate my heart by rubbing whiskey on my gums. This was the extent of cardiac wisdom of the fifties. To say I was spoiled would be an understatement. I was adored by Dolores and Nellie, perfunctorily cared for by my mother, and disliked by my siblings because of the things I was able to get away with that they couldn’t. I couldn’t be spanked.  

My mother tells the story of a time when she was taking the younger kids to Tiny Tots, run by the park and recreation people, which was the extent of preschool in the sixties. She would walk us down a steep hill to the park. That was no harder than controlling four children, a stroller, and gravity at the same time. Coming up the hill was much harder when she had to wheel me up the hill in the stroller while the younger children had to walk. My mom got many a sharp look from passersby. Not only was dragging children around difficult, she had to do it on the San Francisco bus system to get me to my cardiology appointments across town.

I was eighteen months when I had my first surgery. It was called a Blaylock-Tausig Shunt. That worked well until my body grew too big for my weak heart to provide the normal functions of a child. I would go out to play with my siblings and a neighbor would run home with me, being unconscious and blue, to my mother. I was able to go to Kindergarten for a while when my mother had a car. When the car was no longer available, neither was school. So, I sat home with my younger siblings and my mom. I couldn’t play so I stayed by my mother’s side and listened to all the conversations of her coffee klatch. The good girl, whose life was spent vying for the love of her Mommy.