Part 1c

John pulled the car to the patient pick up area near the main entrance of the hospital and an orderly rolled Wendy out to the curb in a wheelchair. Her mousy brown, medium length hair was scraggly and windswept and matted to the back of her head in a rat's nest of knots.  She wore no makeup.  She looked so frail to him, despite the 60 pounds she had packed on this last pregnancy, and woah had she packed 'em on this time.  She used to - for the first few pregnancies, anyway -  stay so fit and trim, playing tennis all the time and he supposed that being in her twenties didn't hurt the cause either. There was still that fierce glow in her eye, a lioness protecting her cubs, it made everyone else fade to a distant second.

Wendy looked at him from her chariot, and there are things that you aren't privy to as a child that run through your parents' heads and they ran through her head.

They headed down South Country Road in a pleasant silence somewhere in the vast gulf set between contempt and the mutual telepathy of beloveds wrought of their 22 year marriage and dad decided to "hoop" the dock.  A dim, setting November sun cast an icy glow over the bay from behind them.  The thin grey clouds hung low and seemed to claw at them and compel them not to return.  Stay here at the bay for a moment longer, forget the children at home and their inevitable questions and needs and constant demands. Get in a boat and sail away. Walk on water.

In the distance the whistle reported the arrival of the 5 o'clock train at Bellport Station.

"Pardon me Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoe,"  mom sang.  They laughed as they remembered the beef and cheese smelling, quite overweight, travelling song and dance man who had visited their church a while back, and shared that bit of musical humor in a nasally vaudevillian voice.

SELF-PITY, FIT-THROWING INTERMISSION HERE:  DISCIPLINED WRITING IS SO DIFFICULT!

I heard the sound of the pebble driveway crunching beneath the tires and ran to the door.  I can remember mom rising out of her door: clad in a hospital nightgown and shrouded by a raccoon fur coat, glowing and reflecting the radiance of the sun.  It was if she was the inspiration for both Galadriel and the Ice Queen from Narnia a quarter of a century in advance.  She walked into the house and we fell all over her with hugs and kisses and cries of how we had missed her.  I missed her most of all.  I was small enough to slip between the bigger kids and get really close to her, and old enough and aware enough to want her more than anyone else. Dad shooed us away and led her to the bedroom.

Of course, we all followed her.  She crawled under the covers, coat and all.  Dad removed his shoes and hung his pants and shirt on his mahogany silent butler, and slipped in next to her.  We all piled on the king sized bed, which back then seemed so much larger than the king sized beds of today.  I know they are still the same size and I have only gotten larger, but memories have a way of tricking into believing that perception really is reality.  The two parents and 7 present children all fit perfectly.  Christa, who had driven over five hours to arrive the night before, brought Ben in and laid him in mom's arms.

She sang in his ear, "lalaloo, lalaloo, oh my little star sweeper, I'll sweep the stardust for you," in her low rich voice, evoking a cello and Patsy Cline, or any of the altos of the past. "...and may love be your keeper, lalaloo, lalaooo, la. la. loo." (It seems as if the alto is a dying breed, everyone wants to sing up in the stratosphere these days.)  It strummed my heart strings, and would yours if you could hear it, and lulled Ben into an easy sleep.  Over the soft tones of her sometimes humming sometimes singing, Dad waxed poetic about the day I was born.  Through the years I have become hardened toward this story, and for a time it rang completely false for me.  A romantic notion that ill represented the actual feelings the man demonstrated for me, because he couldn't have, or failed to have, the ones he imagined he did.

"I drove home from the hospital that day, the angels were dancing on the bay, as the sun tickled the gentle waves the burning wind was whipping up on the no longer still bay.  The angels were singing! And I sang with them."  We all held our breath in lieu of covering our ears because he was about to break forth in his signature song, getting all the words wrong, and somehow escaping mom's correction driven by her strict adherence to pure song accuracy both melodic and lyrical. "HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH, let the hooooooooooooooly anthems rise!"  The next line was delivered with a fervor and a mixture of an irish brogue and an italian, operatic rolling of the "r", "AND the TERRRRRRRRRRRRORRRRRRRRR of the gibbet rise triumphant in the skies."  We would sing the song all wrong right along with him, his confidence signaling to us that these must most certainly be the right words, until in preparing for his funeral some 30 years later it turned out that he was stunningly 100% incorrect.

Part 1b

All that night, mom, who had just had her 9th child at the age of 42, laid in a tiny hospital bed at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital with an 18 gauge needle in her cephalic vein of her arm dripping someone else's A pos blood (11 someone elses' actually) into her nearly completely blood bare body.  What had actually transpired while I was having my dream, clearly induced by some peri-dream connection to reality, was that mom had given birth to a not quite bouncing baby boy and suffered a massive obstetric hemorrhage as the placenta failed to completely detach from her uterus.  The obstetrician from the hospital thought that she probably suffered from placenta accreta-basically the placenta invades and cannot separate from the uterine wall.  This is condition which often requires careful observation throughout the pregnancy and exquisite care  by skilled hands at the time of delivery and carries with it the threat of complications which are various and include maternal death.

"Well she's never had that problem before," barked John, feeling as if his doula powers were being called into question, "so why now?"

Dr. Jin fought back the urge to roll his eyes and raise his voice, and in his calmest best bedside manner fairly whispered, "There are several risk factors: advanced maternal age, multiparity-having a lot of kids..."

"I'm not an idiot, I am quite familiar with the English language!" Dad interrupted, in his not so best bedside manner voice.

"...And any damage to the uterine tissue itself during previous pregnancies or cesarean delivery."  He continued as if he had never been interrupted save for the long breath he took to allow Dad his outburst.  Rule number one of emergency obstetrics according to Dr. Jin: never get into a battle with a 6'5" irishman when his wife nearly died thanks to nine months and one insanely long night of rejecting western medicine.  That was actually more like rule #2403, made up, just then, on the fly...but it felt like number 1 from where all 5'4" of his bespectacled self stood currently.

"Well all of her deliveries have been completely natural, so there goes your cesarean theory."  Triumph mixed with white hot rage brought color up his neck and through his face.  And then a memory flashed through his brain.  Johnny or Tommy was it, I think it was one of the boys, had the doctor who had been impatient for the placenta to deliver.  I distinctly remember this jackanapes putting his hand where it didn't belong and yanking on the placenta.  Bet that loser scarred her with that move, hope he got to cocktail hour on time. Thanks for almost killing my wife, genius, guess that's why they pay you the big bucks. People are so lucky that I'm not litigious.

Mom awoke hours later, "Where's Ben?" she asked, barely enough energy to make a sound it came out like a scared whimper.  Her last memory was of a less than pink, too small, lacking muscle tone, barely moving baby being wrapped in towels as she slumped in the tub and told her namesake, "Wendy, I'm going to Jesus now."

"Oh, No. You. Don't." Cried Wendy the younger with all the strength she could summon, "You're not leaving me all along with that man," pointing to Dad, "and all THESE kids!" waving her arms in demonstration as if there were a crowd behind her.

"Ben's alright, he is at home," Dad assured her.

And with that Mom got up, got dressed and discharged herself from the hospital.  Her son needed her.  Of course the doctors had different ideas, so she was forced to stay for another day.  But she was back home as soon as she could get there, whipping up oatmeal shakes and downing them to make enough milk to get some meat on the bare bones of baby Ben.

Part 1

I'm thinking about writing a book.  A novel dressed up as memoirs of someone who resembles me, made slightly more interesting by fudging some of the details that have become blurry over the years, whether as an act of self preservation or just thanks to this sieve that is now my brain. So I've decided to start writing down snippets of what would be in the book, try to train myself to see if I am really up to the task.  This is a story about love.  It is your typical love story, which means it is like no story about love you've ever heard before.  It is a story about humanity and our individually infinite capacity for love in the midst of living out our very hate filled, dirty, messy lives.  It’s my story, some of it may be true, most of it isn't, at least not in a historical sense.  But you may see in it a reflection of your story, and in that way it is completely true.

I first met him when I was six years old.  He had a third 21^st chromosome and he was far more perfect than any of us who had only 46 chromosomes.  His name was Ben and I fell instantly in love.  He was magical. His complete infantile helplessness was mesmerizing and demanded all of your time and attention and you gave it gladly.  I met him a dark late November night, when he entered this world and almost took our mother out of it in one fell swoop. 

I was so young that it is now hard to tell what parts of these memories are made up,   convoluted or proper, but I remember things from at least four years earlier than this, so it is probably safe to view the account as fairly accurate.  I went to bed November 18, 1983 amidst whispers of older siblings and mom and dad about preparations for a birth.  I climbed the stairs across the foyer from my parents’ bedroom oh so slowly, so as to hear as much as possible without overtly disobeying the instruction to go to bed.  With each of the thirteen steps the wood planks creaked beneath my feet, betraying the fact that I was still on them, but no one would notice this time, they were too busy in the master bedroom. 

I could imagine the scene without being in there to see it.  The gigantic room was dimly lit by low wattage bulbs ensconced in bulbous amber lampshades, which lent an orange glow somewhere halfway between gloomy and romantic.  Though the windows were closed, there was a wicked winter wind blowing from the northeast and slipping through the panes eerily rippling through the diaphanous cream sheers across the front of the room while the floral heavy damask drapes stood their watch on either end.  There was still a crib in the front left corner of the room; although it probably hadn't been used since I was the baby and even then not very often.  Mom, an avid breast feeder and an “attachment” parenting trailblazer even before it had a name, let most of us snuggle up next to her for the better part of our first two years.  The wall was covered in alternating stripes and florals wallpaper with a coffee, cream and maybe a hint of mauve color scheme.  One set of bare feet walked across the plush beige carpet, a boiling pot of water in hand, followed by another with a gigantic “placenta bowl” which also doubled as the popcorn bowl when no babies were being born.

At the time, dad was “furloughed” from the airlines, seemed that he couldn't ever pick the right airline at the right time and just make a ton of money flying for united or delta.  No, he had a bit of bad luck about things like that.  When he was younger he'd squandered a small fortune in Atlantic City and had to get bailed out of some drunken brawl over not being allowed to play past when he went bust by his little brother and was kindly asked never to return to the boardwalk again.  He was currently employed in some adult gambling accepted by polite society, known better as day trading on Wall Street.  Apparently having the same streak of luck as he'd always had in regards to money he was losing far more than he was making to bring home to his family of already 8 children, with the ninth on the way. None of the family members were insured and there were no doctors who would come  to the house to do the delivery for a nominal fee (so they wouldn't have to pay the hospital fees-because those are the ones that will break you) for fear of opening themselves up to malpractice claims.

This fit hand in hand with the wild religious kick mom and dad were currently on, the which they would later blame the other for, but I'll tell you that both of them were all in from where I stood.  Mom was a religious zealot, a true believer in everything she ever believed, and dad could use that kind of fervor to his favor and jumped right on board.   You see, believing that God is omnipotent and still does miracles and that it is only a lack of faith that necessitated the modern conveniences of medicine and doctors fit right into their present need to steer clear of those very things because they were uninsured.  So mom had no prenatal care with this pregnancy, and it seemed to go rather smoothly, so perhaps it was completely unnecessary anyway.  And here she was preparing for her second home birth in less than three years.

Mom was laying in the middle of the king size, pine, four poster bed, with the covers turned down, in her white eyelet nightgown with towels spread under and around her.  I wondered then as I do now, why she wore that stark white dress for an event that is always bloody and would prove to be particularly so this time.  Another set of feet slipped and scratched across the carpet bringing a cup of ice and a pitcher of water.  Someone left and came back and brought with them the scissors that had been boiled in a pot of water and laid them on a towel on the side table.  She labored in near silence-but the quiet moans carried through the house and filled its occupants with a strange foreboding.  A chill ran down my spine as I reached the top of the stairs and heard dad say to the assembled crew, “Let’s get ready to have a baby.”

I was young, so I feel asleep rather quickly, and when you are young you dream vividly, and remember well.  I had one of the most memorable dreams of my life that night, I remember it like it happened last night, only I can't remember what I actually did dream last night.  I heard a scream coming from downstairs and it made me wake up.  I tiptoed to the top of the stairs and heard an argument between my father and a sister regarding whether or not to call 911.  There was no telling who won the argument, in fact I don't think either did, but another sister took advantage of the distraction to actually slip out to the kitchen and call the ambulance from there.  I went downstairs as the ambulance arrived with its male and female occupants.  He was tall and young, a caucasian with dirty blond hair, fit underneath a layer of comfortable fat, with a receding hairline that seemed out of synch with his round baby face.  She was short and somewhat older, stocky and voluptuous with a ton of gorgeous wavy black hair and she was telling her partner something in her Long Island/Puerto Rican accent. They entered the house and I followed them as they walked past the blood soaked carpet of the master bedroom, walked through the front hallway to the kitchen and grabbed something to eat.  They continued into the den and sat on the blue and gold peacock patterned sectional and began playing darts.  I found them to be interesting, which I knew was sinful and faithless.  And my interest invited them to read my thoughts somehow.  I didn't want them to take my mom away, even though that was their intended mission, so they gave me a shot of something that in my mind was most sinisterly intended to murder me and then made off with my mother in their truck.

I did not want to die in the dream, and quickly realized it was a dream, and shook myself awake. I woke up in a puddle of nightmarish sweat and heard only the whistling of the wind through the house.  No, there was something else, but instead of adding noise, it almost made the house seem more silent.  It was a low, lamb-like, weak, whimpering cry of a newborn, who didn't have enough energy to really let it rip. It was the sound of Ben, and it beckoned me to find it.  In a post nightmare, dream fog, I followed the sound, expecting to find my mother near its source, but finding only a tiny strange faced baby.  He had the face of an angel: a high round forehead, round wide set eyes with heavy folds pulling across them in almost an Asian way, ruby red lips and a tiny body wrapped in several towels.  He had been left there in the middle of the bed and I curled up next to him and as we breathed in concert with each other the little trembling bleating stopped and he fell asleep.  I looked down at him, lying on a bed that had no sheets and a huge bloodstain on it, beginning a trail that would lead to the carpet, then to the tiles in the bathroom and ultimately to what looked like the scene of a massacre in the bathtub.  I missed the signs that my mother almost died that night; at least in my conscious state I missed them, because I was so drawn in by this baby.  I couldn't take my eyes and thoughts off of him.  He wooed me and captured my heart and warmed me and I knew I would never let him go.  I was in love and in that love was a peace that didn't make any sense because later I would realize I should have been frightened that night.  But as I was lying there next to my last baby brother, the world felt perfect.  There were no angels singing or dancing their light off the early morning ripples of the bay, but an angelic love radiated from this baby.

Shuffling of feet in and out of the room and cleaning and whispering happened all night long.  It was as if it was happening in a different dimension and though I didn't sleep, I rested with my arm encircling Ben.  I wanted to savor every second of this night, I didn't  want to even close my eyes as if that might break the spell that he had weaved around us with his magic powers.  There was a sense that this wouldn't last forever but for as long as it could last, I would be completely present.