I Might As Well Start At the Beginning
Midwestern Gothic 2018
II don’t know that I want to tell you my birth story. It sits heavy on my tongue like the Jesus stories I was encouraged to share with complete strangers. And just like those stories, it comes with a weight I’ve wrestled with for a long time. It shaped the way
my family looked at me, the expectations they placed on my destiny. I wasn’t born of
a virgin, but I was born blue, four small pounds, and all mixed up inside: some parts connecting where they shouldn’t and others ending before they connected. Jesus stories don’t guide my life anymore, and maybe I’ve outgrown the importance placed on
how I was born. Maybe that’s why I hesitate to tell you. Or maybe I just don’t want to tell my story because at thirty-nine, I have done nothing extraordinary, nothing that confirms I was, in fact, destined to be special.
***
I call my father to hear it all again. It’s been a while. I’m glad I do; he shares details I haven’t heard before. He says it was the summer their pastor, John Wilson, a cowboy (well, he looked like a cowboy) and a preacher set up a big revival-style tent by the interstate near Sundance, Wyoming. The church met there on bails of hay and two-by- twelve boards. “Your mom blew up like an elephant, just got fatter and fatter,”
he tells me. He would carry a lawn chair in and she would waddle (his word) behind in moccasins and a style of shapeless dress my parents have always referred to as a mumu. I love my mother in these memories: faithful to go to church in the hot tent, holding her mumu out from her sweaty legs. She probably had a big bowl of macaroni salad waiting in the fridge for family dinner. And me, tucked away in a whale sized belly with John Wilson’s sermon and the singing of the saints seeping in through my mama’s sweet-smelling skin.
***
Pine Haven, Wyoming. Population 114, give or take. My dad finishes pouring concrete when Mrs. Stevens comes around the corner in her big car driving “100 miles
an hour.” My mother’s water has broken. A month early. With a wad of towels beneath her, she and my father leave my siblings with Mrs. Stevens and make the hour
drive to Spearfish, South Dakota, to the same hospital in which I will birth my first
son twenty-two years later. My dad drops her off at the emergency room door, parks,
and then follows the water trail my mother has left all the way to her room. He loves
to tell this part of the story, “I wondered how I would find your mom.” I don’t say
that he could have just asked the front desk. “All I had to do was follow the trail of
water right to her room.” Still covered in concrete, he watches through a window as
a little blue baby “swims out.” My mom has retained so much water that the doctor
had been wondering for some time if something might be wrong. And she is now
gushing water in excess so that, according to the myth of my family, I swim out. Except four pound babies who aren’t breathing can’t swim. Dr. Meade promptly begins
to give me mouth to mouth.
I can’t tell you the way this image sits in a sacred place of my mind where I keep
the holiest relics, just untouchable things: My mother, who has suddenly lost so many pounds of water, on the bed experiencing a kind of shock that will keep her in the hospital for days. “I couldn’t put my legs down,” she says. “They kept saying ‘Put your legs down.’ but I couldn’t.” My father on the other side of the glass, covered in concrete,
his sunburned face pressed up close watching as a man in scrubs places his grown up mouth on the tiny face of this little blue skinned baby girl who may or may not live.
***
There are five kinds of tracheoesophageal fistulas. I am born with Type B: my baby-sized
esophagus ending before it reaches my stomach and sprouting a small fistula
connecting to my lungs. I am taken in an ambulance to Rapid City, South Dakota,
my mother left behind in Spearfish, an hour away. The next day I am life-flighted to
Denver Children’s hospital where a team is ready. My uninsured family waits for my
mother to be well enough to travel eight hours to Denver, Colorado in their big station wagon with a makeshift bed for her in the back.
The day after I am born, the doctor who delivered me brings a book to my mother
to show what is wrong with her baby. “I didn’t know anything, you know,” she says
when I ask her about this. “There was no internet.” The doctor says that normal-weight
TE Fistula babies have a fifty percent chance. I am not a normal-weight baby. My mom
goes into the hospital bathroom and wails. Her word. “I just wailed,” she says now,
laughing at how the stranger sharing her hospital room must have felt. That night my
dad gets a phone call from the surgeon in Denver. “I can fix this baby,” he says. And
they do. Fix me. They cut in through my small back and sever the fistula from my
esophagus to my lungs. They pull up part of my stomach and create the rest of my esophagus. It will never have the muscles that are required to swallow food, and so I
will spend the rest of my life needing to drink with every bite I take. People will ask if
it bothers me, and I will answer honestly that I don’t know any different, though occasionally I will make a mistake and eat without checking to make sure I have something
to drink. There will be a few times in a car or on a hike when I will panic at the lump of sandwich or carrot sitting in my throat, the discomfort that sometimes becomes pain,
the choice I sometimes have to make to throw up.
At some point my parents sit together before they drive to Denver. “We’ve been
faithful,” my father says to my mom. “God will be faithful too.” I want to argue with my young parents here. I am standing outside this memory of my father’s, and I’m looking
in and thinking, “Well, that is a load of bullshit.” The world is filled with faithful
people, good people who lose babies every day, sometimes in horrible, violent ways.
People who are raped, people who die of cancer, people who see their children raped
or watch them die of cancer. I don’t say any of this, of course. In so many ways, this
is not even my story. It’s my mother’s. And it’s my father’s–a man whose mother died
when he was just seven years old, a man who still can’t believe he is lucky enough to
have a family after being on his own since age 14.
And how can I judge what people find to hold onto in the midst of crisis? I don’t
remember the long 6 weeks I was in the hospital. I don’t remember the sleepless nights
my dad spent rocking me and the dozen or so times I ended up in hospitals throughout
the next four years with aspiration pneumonia, as my newly-made esophagus didn’t
possess the small flap needed to keep liquid from coming right back up and into my
lungs. I don’t know what it is to hold a baby with tubes coming out of her stomach and
string coming out of her nose, to be careful of the two large incisions on her newborn
back. Jesus stories brought comfort to my father during this time. I have no desire to challenge that.
***
Thirty-seven thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money for a builder and his stay-at home
wife. My dad returns to Pine Haven to find that this small Wyoming town on
the edge of a man-made reservoir, a town with one small store and a bar, has had a
cake walk. God, I love this part of the story. I imagine these men in their jeans and
dirty cowboy boots holding the hands of their children and marching around in a
circle to win cakes the wives have made. I imagine those wives earlier in their
kitchens decorated with yellow and gold wallpaper, and brown and orange linoleum. They are frosting German chocolate cakes, slicing bananas for banana cream pies. It’s a
practical kind of small-town love: the baking, the organizing, the event itself. You
pay each time you walk the circle. When the music stops, if you land on a specific
square, a cake is yours. And those cakes, in a town of just over 100 residents, baked
for a local family who is hoping and praying for the recovery of their small broken
baby, raise $2700. Someone from the town brings it to my dad in a paper sack. He
always includes that detail, “$2700 in a paper sack.” Then a man my dad has just
bought land from calls and asks him to meet at the bank. When my dad arrives, he signs back to my father the $4400 he has just paid. “This is my share for your little girl’s bills,” he says to my dad.
Feeling supported and filled with gratitude, my parents are still faced with
$30,000 in bills. “You wouldn’t believe the stack of bills,” my dad says, “from so many places.” My mom begins to write letters to various labs, hospitals, companies. She includes $5 to each, writes that they will be faithful to pay a bit at a time. And then
she gets a call from the Wyoming Children’s Fund. This is a fund given by the oil companies in Wyoming to babies born with birth defects. Denver Children’s Hospital had
called this organization the minute I arrived. All bills are taken care of.
***
How could this young, scared couple not feel that maybe something divine was at play? How could my mom not wonder if the Old Testament scripture she had prayed over me her whole pregnancy–there will be no one who will miscarry or be barren in your land–had actually worked. “I prayed it toward my big belly every day,” she says to me now. She is not the same kind of religious anymore. She still believes in God, but she mostly just believes in kindness, and that has made her reject many of the “Godly” beliefs forced upon her by her Pentecostal preacher father. “Who knows if that scripture didn’t work,” she says to me now. “Lots of stuff works.”
I can see it when my father looks at me, a pride that comes when your kid is a
“good kid,” but maybe more too. He cried when I went on a bike trip down the Alaskan Highway at age 16. “That little girl with tubes out her tummy, that little girl who always had pneumonia, riding her bike over a thousand miles.” He cried when I ran
a marathon. He tells me again this week how proud they are of me. This might have nothing to do with my birth, but there have been times I’ve been keenly aware that I don’t want to let them down, times in my teenage years when I was “living in sin” and afraid that I was breaking some contract God had made with me through my miracu- lous birth and recovery. There are still things I have never told my father about who I am. I might have felt I owed God something, maybe owed my family something, that
it meant so much that I had lived.
***
Maybe Jesus did save me. Maybe my mother’s prayer of that Old Testament verse
rose like a flock of birds that eventually shook some heavenly branch of blessing. Maybe God looked at my father’s faithfulness to his wife, his kids, his church and decided to offer a medical miracle with a financial miracle on top. I don’t know how
I could feel about a God that gives to some “faithful” and holds back from so many.
I don’t know if I can be comfortable with that kind of miracle. But I can see we were saved by an old doctor who acted quickly, a team of surgeons ready and waiting to
do what they had been trained to do, and all of this is wrapped in the miracle of a
tiny town of women baking cakes, a town coming together and marching around
those cakes as a means to give so much, a fellow townsman who forgives a big loan, a state so rich in oil it has enough money to spare for distraught families and their new broken babies. It’s a miracle made of cake and modern medicine and generosity and western oil. And I guess I’m comfortable with that kind of miracle.
***
Sometimes, later in my childhood, a prophet visiting our church would confirm
that “God had big plans” or “a special plan” for me. We put so much faith into coincidences, divine intervention, miracles, prophecy. When I was little I thought I would be famous, a world changer. And yet the very religion that made me feel this possibility was the religion that urged me to marry too young, to have babies right away, to stay home with them, become the martyr of the family, put off the things I
had a pull toward. At some point in my twenties, rocking babies in my lonely living room, or maybe in my thirties, when the wrinkles beginning to grow around my eyes reminded me of time’s passing, I realized mine is just another story in a sea of them, that maybe everyone thinks their own story is special.
Sometimes I’m really afraid I’ve missed something big. “What do I have to show
for all these years?” I ask my husband. And sometimes I don’t say or ask anything. I just sit with it all: my mother in a mumu speaking scriptures to her big belly, the peace my dad says he felt when the surgeon called to say he could fix me, the deep scars
on my back. Sometimes I can swallow it all down, pocket it deep inside. Sometimes, though, it sits like an immovable lump in my throat, and sometimes the discomfort becomes a kind of pain.