Happy Birth Days Carnival

I am proud to participate in my friend Alex's Hayy Birth Days Carnival. The wonderful idea behind the carnival is to share stories about bringing a new child into one's family.

"But wait," you are likely thinking, "you don't have any kids, and I am pretty certain that you are very happy to not bring a child into your family, although if God forbid something happened to any of your relatives or close friends, you would welcome their children into your home and do your best to give them the best life possible."

This is very true. I am very happy to not have any children living with me. Today I cleaned my apartment for several hours, and realized that I am a horrific failure at any basic housekeeping responsibilities as it is, as is my delightful husband. It turns out that we have been sleeping above 40 pounds of dust, as well as Husband's shoe graveyard. I am surprised that there are no shoe hauntings given the number of corpses I discovered.

But I digress. Since I do not have any birth experiences myself (other than my own birth, which I unsurprisingly do not recall - I can barely remember what I ate for breakfast, let alone my emergence into this world 32.5 years ago. I only hope that my first thought was something like, "Well, this shit is overrated."), I will share the story of my mother's birth. This is especially important to me today because my grandmother is having a colonoscopy today, and I am very worried about her. She had colon cancer 10 years ago. Her 86th birthday will be July 4th, and I would tell her birth story, but I do not know it. (I do know that her own mother died very tragically when Grannie was only seven years old.)

On to the story. So my mother and I are very much alike, so it is only fitting that she was born during an enormous blizzard on January 3, 1947. My grandmother had much difficulty in labor, and had to have a c-section. C-sections were pretty rare back then, but my mother's nose somehow managed to hook itself around my granny's tailbone and she was stuck. I think she was also breech, just to complicate the situation. (And if I am wrong on any of this, have no fear, my mom will correct me in the comments.)

The wonderful part of the story is that my mom came out OK. As Granny's close cousin Mary likes to say, "When I heard that Bernice was in labor, I thought, 'In this weather?' and I took the street car in the blizzard and rushed to the hospital to be with her. Oy vey." I love that people were there for them. And so I hope that Granny will be OK today. I can't wait to celebrate her birthday with her next week, and my mom's 61.5 birthday, too.