By Bob Chrisman
It was a dark and stormy night on May 3, 1952. I’ve always wanted to write that cliché opener. Flood waters had swept across the area around St. Joseph, but the Missouri Methodist Hospital was high on a hill. My mother delivered a healthy baby boy. The nurses told her that I looked just like my father because I had thick black hair and sideburns like my father.
I thought I was the second child. My sister was almost ten years older than I was and no one talked about another pregnancy. Had my parents not decided to go to the World’s Fair in Montreal, Canada in 1967, the year I turned 15, I would have lived and died not knowing about the other pregnancy.
Someone told my mother that we needed certified copies of our birth certificates to come back into the United States so she ordered a copy for each of us. They arrived one morning in the mail and she took the official looking, Manila envelope into her bedroom to open. I sat on the floor in anticipation of seeing my birth certificate.
She handed it to me and I read every entry. “Mom, my birth certificate is wrong. It says you have had two other children by live birth.” I showed her the line of the certified copy.
“No, it’s correct.” She walked to the chest of drawer and put the other birth certificates in the box where she kept all the important papers.
“Was the baby a boy or a girl?” I asked because the idea of a missing sibling intrigued me.
“I don’t remember. It was a miscarriage. Something was wrong with the baby.” She kept moving away from me and I was too enthralled with this new knowledge to let it go.
“But, how could you not remember?’
“It’s been a long time ago. I don’t remember anymore.” She walked out of the bedroom.
I let the topic drop because she wouldn’t give me any information. I didn’t take up the question again until years later when my mother, then in her 80s, wrote a short autobiography at my request. She mentioned the loss of a baby somewhere around 1946. My sister would have been going on four years old.
My sister doesn’t remember anything, but she would have been three going on four. My favorite aunt and uncle said they didn’t know anything about a pregnancy which seems hard to believe if the child was a live birth.
As I reflect on that lost baby, I wonder how that colored her reaction to being pregnant with me and to my birth. Maybe that accounts for the way she protected me against everything and everyone. I’ll never know the answers to my questions, which are a circumstance of my birth.
-Related to topic post WRITING TOPIC – 3 QUESTIONS. [NOTE: This is the third of three questions mentioned by actor and writer Anna Deavere Smith in an interview with Bill Moyers (see link). She talked about the questions in the context of interviewing people and listening to them. The three questions came from a linguist Smith met at a cocktail party in 1979; the questions were, according to the linguist, guaranteed to break the patterns and change the way people are expressing themselves. QuoinMonkey, ybonesy, and frequent guest writer Bob Chrisman take on the three questions by doing a Writing Practice on each.]
-Also related to posts: PRACTICE: Have You Ever Come Close To Death? — 15min (by ybonesy), PRACTICE: Have You Ever Come Close To Death? — 15min (by Bob Chrisman), PRACTICE — Have You Ever Come Close To Death? — 15min (QuoinMonkey), PRACTICE: Have You Ever Been Accused Of Doing Something You Didn’t Do? — 15min (by Bob Chrisman); PRACTICE: Have You Ever Been Accused Of Doing Something You Didn’t Do? — 15min (by ybonesy), and PRACTICE — Have You Ever Been Accused Of Doing Something You Didn’t Do? — 15min (by QuoinMonkey)
redravine.wordpress.com 
Bob, you know what strikes me about this Writing Practice is how no one knew about the miscarriage, how it’s one of the family secrets. It reminds me that women used to feel shame about miscarriages, like it was somehow their fault. I don’t know if it’s still like that today or not.
The impact it had on you once you found out strikes me, too. And the fact that it was a live birth. I do think it’s something women just didn’t talk about, usually a sad event in their lives.
I remember when I was about 13 or 14 my mother had a miscarriage. She woke up in the middle of the night and had to be rushed to the hospital. It scared me to death. I think she almost died from the blood loss.
I wonder why people don’t talk more about events like this in the family. Or maybe they do today. Things are a lot different now. It used to be that people just didn’t talk openly about family losses.
Your last paragraph, wondering about how the event impacted the way your mother viewed her pregnancy with you. It’s a good question. A mystery.
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QM, in the late 1950’s pregnant women were trouble, signs of a sexual happening that somehow made other people ashamed. I had 5 kindergarten teachers in my year in class because four of them turned up pregnant and pregnant women couldn’t teach. As soon as a woman started to show, she had to leave her job especially if she worked with children.
And, I don’t think that her sisters didn’t know about the miscarriage. I think that no one spoke about it. I’ll have to get out the autobiography that my mother wrote. I remember a line about how nervous she became after that experience.
When I was little she had severe eczema all over her hands. She had a special lotion that she used when the skin would crack. She didn’t get over that until I was about 10 years old and then it went away.
So much I don’t know about my family.
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Bob,
Is it possible your mom could forget the sex of her baby? I mean, it’s possible, considering everything else that had to be hidden. I wonder if this child was buried, or too premature for that to happen.
My mom had a miscarriage a few years after I was born. The first time I found out I wasn’t the official “baby of the family” I was stunned. Mom was a registered nurse, so more divulging of facts of science, perhaps. She told me the baby was too little for them to know if it was a boy or a girl. She said it was put in a jar, and taken somewhere for doctors to study.
I had her tell me this story over and over–this baby in the jar story.
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Teri, I guess she could have forgotten the sex of the baby. I don’t think the child was buried, but she would never talk about whether the child was born at the end of 9 months or whether she miscarried during her pregnancy, let alone what happened to it. The birth certificate, from what I remember, says, that two other children had been born to the mother.
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Interesting that the birth certificate says “live birth” and your mother said “miscarriage”. A miscarriage, by definition is the spontaneous end of a pregnancy at a stage before the fetus is viable (about 20 to 24 weeks). Life birth denotes just that, the baby was born alive. So the notation on the birth certificate pretty much rules out a miscarriage.
I know that many people, at that time and even now, don’t talk about miscarriages. It’s kind of an unmentionable subject. The common belief is that it’s better not to talk about it. This is actually one of the reasons that it is so difficult for women who have miscarriages to get over it.
I know that when I had my miscarriages, no one wanted to talk about it. Even my PTA friends and neighbors didn’t discuss it for more than a day or two. Instead, they put on a happy face and talked about how I could have more babies. I think people mean well by not dwelling on a very difficult time but in not allowing the mother to mourn, they end up making it more difficult for the mother to “get over it” (no, you never get over it; it has been many years for my series of miscarriages but I’m not over it). And in not being allowed to discuss it, it becomes more and more taboo.
Families are full of secrets and mystery. That much is a given.
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http://corinajoyc.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/on-the-day-that-you-were-born/
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Bob, my mother had eczema, too, and I used to get it in my teens. Stress and anxiety exacerbate it. It’s also often runs in families. My grandfather used to get it, too, and he was a rough-and-tumble cowboy.
My first pregnancy was a miscarriage at four months, and afterward, as I was mourning the loss, many women shared with me that they’d also had miscarriages. I remember thinking it was like people coming out of the woodwork.
I know I continue to talk to friends of mine who’ve had stillbirth or miscarriage about our experiences. Speaking for myself, it’s not something I talk about unless it’s in this spirit of camaraderie.
But in the 1950s and probably up until very recently (as Corina’s experience suggests this might even be something that is still not widely transformed) people held their losses inside. That stoic character.
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I also wanted to say that this piece made me think about when and if I might ever share my own experience of miscarriage with my daughters. I was thinking that it would be something we talk about when we talk about pregnancy. I can imagine that when they are pregnant themselves, hopefully not before many many years from now, this would also be helpful information in understanding possible risks. My second pregnancy, which gave me Dee, was treated in the early months as higher risk because of the miscarriage.
I’ve written about my miscarriage in writing practices, not for a long time, but I also had the most no-nonsense nurse in the emergency room. And the doctor on call was great. She was able to run tests to find out what had caused the miscarriage. She continued to be my doctor for many years, until she got sick and went on leave. I often think of her and the nurse.
BTW, Corina, I will read your piece after I have a chance this evening to do my own Writing Practice on the topic. I wanted to do mine last night but was too exhausted after staying up late to make some resin bracelets. And now time for work, so mine won’t be out until this evening.
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BTW, Teri, your comment made me think about how fascinating birth stories are anyway, and then to hear about the baby in the jar story. Wow, I can just imagine how intriguing and mysterious that was, and how any bit of information, even if it was the same few lines told over and over, how it would draw a kid in.
My girls love to hear the stories of their births. They love to look at photos of them when they were newborn. We have photos snapped moments after their birth, my legs still covered in blood, and these little purpley babies on my chest. Em can’t handle the blood photos, she’s got the blood aversion thing in a big way, but other than that they can’t get enough. I think we’re universal that way. We really do want to know about ourselves, every little detail.
That strikes me as why it is so confounding when we don’t get to hear it, when that information is shut down to us.
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Corina & yb, people didn’t talk about sex or pregnancy or miscarriages or stillbirths like they didn’t talk about what went on in the family unit. Secrecy, privacy, something…I don’t know exactly what…kept them from talking.
I know that people still say things like, “You can have another child” in much the same way that they say to people whose experience the death of a loved one, “He/She is in a better place.” They don’t understand that those words are not comforting.
When a close friend suffered a miscarriage with her first pregnancy at 40 years old, she had people ask her why and if she and her husband would try again. She had people tell her that it was normal. All she really wanted to do was to vent about it. The experience changed her a great deal. She withdrew from most of her friends. Although it’s been a couple of years now, she still hasn’t recovered.
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I’m with Em on the bloody stuff.
I once knew a woman who sat next to me at a party and asked, “Do you want to see baby pictures?”
I said, “Yes.”
She took out a stack of photos and handed me the first one. It looked like she had her legs spread. I asked, “I think we’re looking at the wrong set of pictures. These appear to be photos of your personal parts.” I tried to make a joke of it because I didn’t know her well enough to see these kind of pictures.
“Oh, no, these are the right pictures. The baby’s head is in this photo.”
I swear, if i had taken a stack of the photos, held one side and then let the other side go, I would have had a movie of her daughter being born right before my eyes. I was too stunned by the photos to do anything but look until we got to the more traditional baby pictures.
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[…] — Have You Ever Been Accused Of Doing Something You Didn’t Do? — 15min (by QuoinMonkey); PRACTICE: Do You Know The Circumstances Of Your Birth? — 15min (by Bob […]
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Oh, that’s funny, Bob. Poor you, having to sit through that.
Re: reactions from people when hearing about a miscarriage, I never knew until I went through it myself how much of a loss it was. The thing is, you can’t help but create a whole new world for yourself. There is so much wrapped up in pregnancy, the physical and emotional, and the dreams. You picture who the baby looks like, and you picture yourselves doing things, and it’s more than just picturing–it’s creating a whole new sense of yourself and your family.
I never knew what all I had created, besides this embryo. And it was a huge loss. And one that I think perhaps the woman goes through much moreso than her partner, because it’s part of you.
I don’t remember anyone saying anything offensive to me when they heard about it. Mostly I just remember how so many women shared with me their stories, and how I felt they understood and that I wasn’t alone.
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[…] — Have You Ever Been Accused Of Doing Something You Didn’t Do? — 15min (by QuoinMonkey), PRACTICE: Do You Know The Circumstances Of Your Birth? — 15min (by Bob Chrisman), PRACTICE: Do You Know The Circumstances Of Your Birth? — 15min (by […]
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[…] post over at Red Ravine asked readers to write about the circumstances of their birth. It got me thinking about an […]
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