Life: Birth Days

I'm the oldest because the baby before me didn't make it all the way to birth.


I was born in the fall. But I don't remember.

* * * * *

The earliest memory I have is of being shown the sister one younger than myself. So, I would be two and a half years old. What I remember is opening my mom's bedroom door softly, knowing my mom wanted to see me. I suppose she had been gone, she must have returned, I must have been summoned. But I don't remember. The movie of my memory comes alive as I am pushing the door gently open and looking around it. My mom is sitting on her bed which is completely strewn, covered, with baby stuff. I did not recognize any individual and discrete items at the time and I can't reconstruct anything specific now. I bet there were diapers, but that's just an informed guess. Whatever was on the bed, there was a ton of it and it had been arranged as for public display. My mom did that, laid stuff out like it was going to be formally reviewed. Every year, after the frenzy of Christmas or Easter morning subsided and people had started eating their candy but before anyone could get too involved in a new book, she always made us gather everything up, take it to our rooms, make our beds and compose our gifts artistically so that guests arriving later could easily peruse our loot, not in a jumbled mass but in a pleasing collage. Books fanned out so each title showed, shirts folded and stacked like stair steps with each one visible, necklaces stretched out chains and all. It was the bed, loaded and groaning with my new sister's haul, that took my full attention when I came into the room. My mom was holding something out to me, saying "Come and see!" but I just stood at the foot of the bed staring at the stacks. "Who's is all of this?"
"It's for the new baby, come and see!"
"All of it? All of it is for the baby?" (OK, author's note here. Yes. I talked like this at two and a half. Probably at eighteen months. It's a thing in my family, the babies talk early and well.)
"Yes," my mom is saying, "don't you want to see your sister?"
I wrenched my eyes from material gain and looked.
First of all, my mom had been nursing her and that was the most awkward and unnatural thing I had ever seen. I delicately averted my eyes. Sorry everyone.
Second. I looked back, editing my field of vision, seeing only sister, nothing icky. And realized my parents had been had. Someone had pawned a terrible thing off on them and they were too crazy excited, inexperienced or just too unobservant to notice. This was nothing like any little sister I had been led to expect. You'll be able to play with her and talk to her and share your toys with her and she'll be your best friend, they had told me, laying the foundation for the coming addition to the family.
Of course I had believed them.
And formed expectations accordingly.


Two years old is not very far off the ground, but I had seen enough of life to know that the unfortunate creature lying practically naked in my mom's arms was not going to do any of those things. Ever. On the other hand, since I had not been particularly wanting a sister before this thing came, I felt no sadness or disappointment, only embarrassment for my parents. Whatever this was, it was obviously no threat to my happy little world, my serene and cushy security. I felt nothing for or about it.
I made polite conversation with my mom for a minute, agreed the thing she had was lovely and slipped away, saddened for parents who had been hoping for a sister.

* * * * *

I don't remember the next sister till she suddenly began to laugh one evening at my silly big sister antics which, up till that point, had never once been for the baby's benefit. Who would show off for a baby? It would be like performing for shoes. I remember my game had something to do with balloons, with throwing balloons up in the air and letting them bonk me in the face, over and over mindlessly and aimlessly and then she was bursting out in those bubbly, fat little chortles behind me and I remember spinning around to face a giggling baby, completely taken aback to hear her make so sensible and organized a sound as laughter, just as if she were a real person. I was even more shocked when my mom told me the baby was laughing at me, that she thought I was funny. The baby. Thinking. Unbelievable. I experimented, repeating my balloon act for this tiny new crowd. The baby shrieked. It was true. My biggest fan. I threw my balloons in earnest and the baby howled, leaning toward me and shaking, helpless with laughter, gently bonking my head with hers. I threw and threw and waxed achingly comedic. I'll never do the balloon dance again like I did it that night. The other little sister was getting in the way now, elbowing in on my successes, trying to out-balloon me but she was too young and kept getting it wrong and the baby got distracted and bored and looked away and sighed and my mom said, "Alright, now you're just silly," and it was over and everybody went to bed. But after that I knew the baby would turn into a person someday after she was done being a baby. And she got interesting to me.

I do remember, though, going to the hospital when she came, and playing outside with the other sister because children couldn't visit in the hospital. We had been taken to the hall outside the nursery, to the huge window where a nurse held up some wadded blanket and my grandma said, "See your new baby sister?" and I was wise from past experience so I was neither surprised nor saddened by the travesty. Nor interested. And then they put us outside to play while they visited my mom and that baby. The hospital had a wonderful big courtyard, wide shallow steps descending on four sides to a great sunken square in the center. At the top level in each of the corners were planters nearly as big as the central square with huge old aloes and cacti and trees and ornamental things and a broad cement boarder to run around and around. I could have stayed and played there for a hundred years. It was so fun I refused to get scared when the little sister started to wonder if Dad would ever come back because it was getting dark, streetlights coming on, the sun down behind one of the planters. I just told her he would and grabbed her hand and dragged her up and down the stairs for a while till she was happy again and not crying. Then Dad took us home and made something like food that was good and not what our mom made. We never saw one person go into or out of the hospital while we were running in the courtyard. We would have been three and five and a half, respectively.

* * * * *

The next sister I should remember from the get go, but I don't, even though I was ten when she was born. I do remember the miscarriage before her birth and the strange hopelessness of it, not that the kids wanted another sister so much, but that my mom was so sick for so long and then the baby was just dead and gone and there was nothing for all that. Nothing to hold, nothing to show. It was such a terrible emptiness and my mom was to desolate, so ripped up and there was no place for us girls to put our eyes, nothing for us to do but be good and quiet and clean the house while they were gone to the hospital. And that wasn't any use, either, because we seemed to mess it up again before they got back so my dad yelled at us softly, tired, because they really needed our help right now and couldn't we just have cleaned up? Just that? We were too sad and strange and he was too weary for us to defend ourselves because it was always the boys who died, just as they became boys, and he was too sad and lonely for them. And we were all girls. No way to get out of that, no matter how we tried, to be boys. He didn't complain, he liked us. We just didn't grow up to be sons. We never spoke to anyone or among ourselves of my mom's pregnancies till after the fourth month or so, or if we did we always appended the phrase "if it lives." I did that with my own pregnancies, because I was used to it, that's how we always did it at home. It hurt and upset my friends but it helped me with my own losses, when they came.


So I don't remember that sister being born. I remember a baby that sat on my left hip for a whole summer. I remember the next summer my mom said Take The Baby! no matter where I was going, to the cemetery, to the park, to the dam (sheesh! yikes! zowie!), to the store. The baby rode on my handlebars. She was there one time when a giant dog came after us, running along side, trying to nip her feet, so tall he only had to turn his head. I had to ram him hard with my front tire so he would go away and that made her fall off but I caught her. Mostly. But she was hurt so I had to scrub her owies on some one's lawn (grass cleans. you know.) then put her some place high up and go after the dog, riding hard to catch him, seriously ramming him a couple of times, climbing off my bike to throw rocks at him. Then I had to go back and get the baby and take her home to put on bandaids and feed her because my mom was at work. That was in the summer. In the winter that baby lived mostly with my grandma. My grandma still thinks she owns that sister.

* * * * *

The last birth day I missed because I was at college, traveling with the speech and debate team. I came home in the middle of the night and a roommate staggered out to tell me there had been a phone call, a baby had been born. So I called home, excited, thrilled, thinking they would be excited, thrilled, waiting to hear from me. They had not been waiting. They had been sleeping. Not thrilled, exactly. My dad was civil.
"But what is it? What is the baby?"
"What is it? It's a girl, of course. What else would it be?"
I didn't keep him on the phone.
There had been more miscarriages after the fourth sister. As my mom got older, it got harder and she had decided she was finished. Definitely.
Here's how she told me she was going to have another baby. I was home from college and we were washing dishes. No one else around. I was pouring out the engrossing, true, though artfully edited, history of Suzanne At College when my mother cut across one of my best sentences. "What do you think is the worst thing that could happen to me?"
A strange query, coming so abruptly in the middle of so fascinating a narrative, but engaging. I turned on it the full blaze of my recently sharpened focus and shiny new college freshman intellect. After a moment's intense mental effort I offered an elaborate scenario; house burns, total loss of worldly goods, family dies horribly, she is terribly injured but survives to endless painful procedures and a life of medical debt. I still think this is pretty good. She considered, rinsing out a glass. "No. It's worse. I'm pregnant. The baby's coming after the new year."
I would be eighteen.
"If it lives," I said.
"It'll live. Five months, now."
And it did live. It has two babies of its own.
Another baby I would only really know in the summers. Everyone thought she was mine, of course, if I happened to be the sister holding her. I was equally skewered by the humor and the horror. "She's my sister." No one believed me. It happened to whichever of the oldest three were holding her. "She's our sister." A littlest sister with nephews close enough to her in age that one of them played Petruchio to her Kate.

* * * * *

So, here's the thing. I remember happy cakes and candles and pretty gifts and pinatas and trips to the zoo but I don't remember a single birth day in my immediate, growing up family. I only remember the parties we had after. I remember cement stairs and mean dogs and piles of what weren't my presents. How can you tell, as you go, what should have been noticed, will be important to someone later? Tell me about the day I was born. Sorry, little sis, you'll have to ask your mother.

And good luck with that.



Noah's photos