Petition to elevate my mother to sainthood
(In another 7 hours hours, I will be 25. I don't plan on being awake at my birth-time, so I'll post this now instead...)
January 26, 2006. Twenty-five years ago, at 4:17 am, I was born.
I had an unusual birth. Well, that’s not so true, I suppose. My birth was much like any other, except that it involved me, and since I’m the best thing to happen to planet Earth since the surface cooled, that’s enough to elevate my mother to sainthood. My egoistic self-indulgences aside, though, my mother deserves special kudos for an inhuman patience with cluelessness. My mother deserves special praise for not back-handing my father into a new time zone.
My mother and father lived in Smith Center, Kansas, while she was pregnant. Now, for those of you who have never met my father, he is sometimes a bit... um... well, let’s just say unreasonable from time to time. He gets in moods every once in a while where he recruits everyone in the house to do housework (or some big project he’s dreamed up) and makes you all feel guilty or punishes you if you refuse to help. I remember getting grounded from watching cartoons on Saturday morning for a month once when I was little because I hadn’t been cheerful when we’d had to clean the garage on a Saturday morning at what had to have been, like, 7:00 am.
The bad part about this is that he’ll make you help him and your excuses be damned. He sets some arbitrary deadline (usually unrealistically short) and then mandates that the task be done by then. I can still remember a night when I was about 8, and I remember being hauled out of bed at 11:00 pm on a school-night because my father realized that the house was a mess and that my brother and I needed to clean the bathroom NOW. No, tomorrow wasn’t just as good, and the fact that we were supposed to be up early the next morning to go to off to elementary school wasn’t a problem for him. If he could be awake, then so could we.
Well, apparently my father had one of his weird cleaning moods on January 26, 1981. With his wife 8 months pregnant, he decided that he wanted to rearrange the furniture in the house. He grudgingly did all the work by himself until it came time to move a refrigerator up the basement steps into the kitchen. Well, he ‘recruited’ my mother into helping him by faking that he pulled a muscle in his back when he was halfway up the basement stairs with the thing.
Now, I may have training in biology, but my background isn’t really in human biology. Nevertheless, I’m fairly sure that having an 8-month pregnant woman help you move a refrigerator up a flight of stairs isn’t on the doctor’s list of things you should do while pregnant. In fact, I’m fairly sure that it is on the list of things you ought to avoid.
Well, the strain of the exertion sent my mother into labor. My father, recalling his training for the situation and his experience with my brother 2 years earlier, knew that a rapid flight to the hospital wasn’t necessary at this stage and that they didn’t need to leave until the contractions got to be to some certain frequency and severity. So he told my mother that he was going to go into the bedroom and take a nap for an hour, and that when he got up they would leave. He set a timer, and told her to relax.
My mother waited on the living-room sofa while my father took a nap (ignore for now the gall of asking your wife who is in labor to sit on the sofa while you take a nap). She waited. And waited. And waited. She thought to herself that ‘this is the longest hour I’ve ever endured!’ Finally, she went into the bedroom and found out that he’d been resetting the timer back another 10 minutes to prolong his nap, and had done so for about an extra hour.
When she finally got him to get in the car and leave, they drove to the nearest hospital. Naturally, of course, there was no hospital in Smith Center, so they drove to the next town over: Phillipsburg. They arrived at 11:45 pm. (The time is important).
My father rushed into the hospital and told the doctors that his wife was out in the car in labor, and that she needed to be admitted to the hospital. When he found out that admitting her at 11:50 pm would entail that he be charged for an additional day of in-hospital stay for my mother, he did the unthinkable.
He had her wait in the car for another 15 minutes so that she would be admitted after midnight.
Despite all the fuss and my father’s typical miser-esque attitude about spending money, I was born - all 4 pounds, 3 ounces of sleepy, tiny me. I was rushed off to the NICU to the incubator (I was a full month early, so I guess that was the standard protocol) and stayed there for a few weeks. They gave me a 1 in 100 shot of living, and I guess I was using lucky dice that day or something (not that should be a consolation to the other 99 babies similarly situated who lost the medical lottery, I suppose).
My mother, having had a relatively uncomplicated birth (I understand that some babies are significantly larger), went home from the hospital. When they called my parents and told them that it was alright for them to come and get me, my mother sent my father to go pick me up from the hospital.
Well, my father thought to himself, "Hmmm... I can’t very well hold a baby while I’m driving. It wouldn’t be safe..." So he engineered himself up a solution using what he had on hand. He had just bought some shoes, so took the shoe-box and lined it with socks from his sock drawer. Yes, I was carried home in a shoe-box. My mother’s shock when he pulled into the driveway and removed the shoe-box from the TRUNK of the car was not assuaged when he defensively noted that he’d put air-holes in the box’s lid with a screwdriver.
At least I know I come by my cluelessness through heredity and not by choice.
A woman with less patience would have snapped before then. My mother didn’t, though. I’m fairly positive that thoughts concerning knives and sensitive male organs might have been involved in her reaction, but - much to my mother’s credit - this paragon of patience simply took the shoebox inside and introduced me to my first home.
So, Mom, thanks for bearing and birthing me. And an extra helping of thanks for not killing the man I call Dad.
January 26, 2006. Twenty-five years ago, at 4:17 am, I was born.
I had an unusual birth. Well, that’s not so true, I suppose. My birth was much like any other, except that it involved me, and since I’m the best thing to happen to planet Earth since the surface cooled, that’s enough to elevate my mother to sainthood. My egoistic self-indulgences aside, though, my mother deserves special kudos for an inhuman patience with cluelessness. My mother deserves special praise for not back-handing my father into a new time zone.
My mother and father lived in Smith Center, Kansas, while she was pregnant. Now, for those of you who have never met my father, he is sometimes a bit... um... well, let’s just say unreasonable from time to time. He gets in moods every once in a while where he recruits everyone in the house to do housework (or some big project he’s dreamed up) and makes you all feel guilty or punishes you if you refuse to help. I remember getting grounded from watching cartoons on Saturday morning for a month once when I was little because I hadn’t been cheerful when we’d had to clean the garage on a Saturday morning at what had to have been, like, 7:00 am.
The bad part about this is that he’ll make you help him and your excuses be damned. He sets some arbitrary deadline (usually unrealistically short) and then mandates that the task be done by then. I can still remember a night when I was about 8, and I remember being hauled out of bed at 11:00 pm on a school-night because my father realized that the house was a mess and that my brother and I needed to clean the bathroom NOW. No, tomorrow wasn’t just as good, and the fact that we were supposed to be up early the next morning to go to off to elementary school wasn’t a problem for him. If he could be awake, then so could we.
Well, apparently my father had one of his weird cleaning moods on January 26, 1981. With his wife 8 months pregnant, he decided that he wanted to rearrange the furniture in the house. He grudgingly did all the work by himself until it came time to move a refrigerator up the basement steps into the kitchen. Well, he ‘recruited’ my mother into helping him by faking that he pulled a muscle in his back when he was halfway up the basement stairs with the thing.
Now, I may have training in biology, but my background isn’t really in human biology. Nevertheless, I’m fairly sure that having an 8-month pregnant woman help you move a refrigerator up a flight of stairs isn’t on the doctor’s list of things you should do while pregnant. In fact, I’m fairly sure that it is on the list of things you ought to avoid.
Well, the strain of the exertion sent my mother into labor. My father, recalling his training for the situation and his experience with my brother 2 years earlier, knew that a rapid flight to the hospital wasn’t necessary at this stage and that they didn’t need to leave until the contractions got to be to some certain frequency and severity. So he told my mother that he was going to go into the bedroom and take a nap for an hour, and that when he got up they would leave. He set a timer, and told her to relax.
My mother waited on the living-room sofa while my father took a nap (ignore for now the gall of asking your wife who is in labor to sit on the sofa while you take a nap). She waited. And waited. And waited. She thought to herself that ‘this is the longest hour I’ve ever endured!’ Finally, she went into the bedroom and found out that he’d been resetting the timer back another 10 minutes to prolong his nap, and had done so for about an extra hour.
When she finally got him to get in the car and leave, they drove to the nearest hospital. Naturally, of course, there was no hospital in Smith Center, so they drove to the next town over: Phillipsburg. They arrived at 11:45 pm. (The time is important).
My father rushed into the hospital and told the doctors that his wife was out in the car in labor, and that she needed to be admitted to the hospital. When he found out that admitting her at 11:50 pm would entail that he be charged for an additional day of in-hospital stay for my mother, he did the unthinkable.
He had her wait in the car for another 15 minutes so that she would be admitted after midnight.
Despite all the fuss and my father’s typical miser-esque attitude about spending money, I was born - all 4 pounds, 3 ounces of sleepy, tiny me. I was rushed off to the NICU to the incubator (I was a full month early, so I guess that was the standard protocol) and stayed there for a few weeks. They gave me a 1 in 100 shot of living, and I guess I was using lucky dice that day or something (not that should be a consolation to the other 99 babies similarly situated who lost the medical lottery, I suppose).
My mother, having had a relatively uncomplicated birth (I understand that some babies are significantly larger), went home from the hospital. When they called my parents and told them that it was alright for them to come and get me, my mother sent my father to go pick me up from the hospital.
Well, my father thought to himself, "Hmmm... I can’t very well hold a baby while I’m driving. It wouldn’t be safe..." So he engineered himself up a solution using what he had on hand. He had just bought some shoes, so took the shoe-box and lined it with socks from his sock drawer. Yes, I was carried home in a shoe-box. My mother’s shock when he pulled into the driveway and removed the shoe-box from the TRUNK of the car was not assuaged when he defensively noted that he’d put air-holes in the box’s lid with a screwdriver.
At least I know I come by my cluelessness through heredity and not by choice.
A woman with less patience would have snapped before then. My mother didn’t, though. I’m fairly positive that thoughts concerning knives and sensitive male organs might have been involved in her reaction, but - much to my mother’s credit - this paragon of patience simply took the shoebox inside and introduced me to my first home.
So, Mom, thanks for bearing and birthing me. And an extra helping of thanks for not killing the man I call Dad.
posted by The Academian | 6:56 PM
4 Comments:
I really hate to do it, but I'm going to have to call BS on the coming-home-in-a-shoebox-in-the-trunk thing. The rest I believe, but, seriously?
I, too, have to say that the shoebox bit of the story seems far-fetched. Yeah, your dad was clueless, but no one takes home their son like they would take home a turtle from the pet store.
P.S. Happy Birthday!
I wouldn't even put a turtle in the trunk of my car.
Actually, it's all true. In my Dad's defense, though, the shoe-box wasn't his original plan. The doctor actually suggested it. The way my father tells the story, the doctor told him on the phone that a car ride could be stressful for me, and that he should do what he could to make me comfortable, and that I had shown (while in the incubator at the hospital) that I preferred close quarters that were warm and dark. My Dad says that the doctor suggested lining a shoebox with washcloths or tea-towels or something.
The trunk part was a bit shocking to me, but my Dad says that it was a conscious decision on his part to put me in the trunk because it was the safest part of the car. The way those old oldsmobiles (or maybe it was cadillacs.. I forget now) were built, a person could have a car wreck with serious injuries to people in the cabin, but a box of wine goblets in the trunk would come out unscathed. They were built like battle tanks from the rear, and he figured that if anything should go wrong on the drive home, he wanted me to make it through okay.
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