One Tiny Breath

The baby was battered black and blue and thrown on a table for dead. My mother always said thrown, but it must have been for effect; she wasn’t even there. Well, she was in the room, but she still wasn’t all there.

My mother had been so heavily sedated, she missed all the excitement. When she woke two days later, she felt like she’d been hit by a Mack truck.  The story was pieced together for her. She remembered going to Lightner Hospital to give birth to her second baby. The baby was not positioned correctly and was coming arm first. Many doctors and nurses were called to assist and at one point my father was asked if they could only save one, was it to be his wife or baby?

The miracle was my mother also woke to a baby daughter. A nurse had walked by the table in the delivery room and thought she saw a breath. She wasn’t mistaken and the baby was worked on as furiously as my mother was. The baby was saved, but they didn’t how long she might live. Mother couldn’t hold or care for my sister in the hospital room because of her extensive bruising and was told not to get attached to her. Mother secretly wondered if they had given her the wrong baby because the dark-skinned mother in the next bed was swaddling a beautiful baby with much lighter skin.

As her missing days continued to fall into place, Mother found out the baby had already been named. She wanted to name a baby boy Jerry after her sister’s baby who had passed as an infant and Don after my dad, Donald–Jerry Don. If it was a girl, she was going to be Geri Dawn. One of my father’s cousins had been the nurse at the main desk when he went to officially fill out the papers. She convinced him it would be much more clever and appropriate if my sister were named after my father. So, Geri Don she became, without my mother’s permission. And Mother didn’t find it amusing. As a matter of fact, she often reminded Daddy of it, over those early years.

My aunt and father went to the hospital to pick Mother and Geri up, and I went along. I was four years old and my aunt and I sat in the back seat holding my new baby sister upon the tiny feather pillow the hospital had sent her home on, long before car seats. She had to be carried on the pillow until she either healed or died, whichever came first. It didn’t take long before we knew–that baby was going to be around for a long, long, time.

The only effect from such a traumatic birth was that my sister’s arm would periodically “pop out of place”. We babied that arm that waved it’s way into the birth canal and caused so much hullabaloo that August day in 1963. She might calmly be making mud pies on the front porch and suddenly scream in pain from a dislocated arm and shoulder. The first few times, she would be rushed to the doctor and it would be “popped” back into place. On one such trip, everyone noticed while she was standing up in the seat by my dad as he drove his rusty old Chevy truck, the crying stopped. The shifting gears in the bumpity truck seemed to jog the arm back where it needed to be. From then until the arm healed on its own, my dad would throw her into the truck everytime she would scream and hold it close to her body. And ta-da!

In the above photo, our mother took Geri to my elementary school to have her picture taken on picture day. At two years old, she was afraid to go back to the school because her last visit had been for a polio shot. She didn’t know what was happening. It wasn’t until the pictures were sent home weeks later, that tiny tears were seen in her eyes. When asked who was in the picture, Geri denied it was her and said, “Daddy’s little crybaby.”

That little girl who loves her name because of its special creation is about to be a grandma. It is a time in life to look forward with excitement, to all the possibilities a beautiful new innocent life brings, but it is also a time to slip back into the mist of our own childhood memories and remember the days of our own beginnings and innocence.