riotheclown

She came out like greased lightning, it was so fast no one even knew it was happening, born in with the sack intact, (they used to kill those babies in the Dark Ages: witches they thought) They put her on my chest, still wiping off the chalky paste filling her folds and crevasses. Her face was deep red and she had a scowl that made me laugh.

Her dad was still trying to get out the backgammon board, the last time the boredom was excruciating. Twenty-four hours of labour with her brother, most of it spent frozen from the neck down wired to a monitor.

***

We were living in a walkup above an upholstery store. The landlord was “kindly” but he chastised me when he could see I was pregnant. My husband was out of work, at home with our son “who cried too much”. He said, “Have a girl and then no more! One of each” he wiped one hand with the other in a gesture to show me what he thought of my fertility.

I was lucky to have gotten a job in my condition. I hid the pregnancy as long as I could. No one was going to hire me pregnant. My parents had washed their hands of us. My father looked at me as a reminder of what he fought so hard to escape: poverty, and social ostracism. There was no way I was going to have an abortion. I wasn’t going to say I thought it was wrong, just that I couldn’t have one.

But we were so young! It had only been the blink of an eye before that when we had been lulling away our mornings in each others arms, taking a whole day to read the paper. Work was always available. We had great dreams and decent jobs. We were quirky counter culture popular. We had no worries. We were going to start a business.

Before we knew it everything was hard. It was hard convincing my son to stop nursing. It was hard getting on the streetcar and hearing him screaming, “MOMMY!” and hard going to work with nothing to eat and seeing the babies in the office daycare and not crying. It seemed like there was no compassion. It seemed like everyone had a harder story to tell and it was meant to teach me to toughen up. “You made your bed!” was what my father said. A woman older than time told me, “My husband was killed in the first world war and I had to go to work in the garment industry and leave my five year old looking after her two year old brother all day! You’ll be fine. They’ll be fine! Stop crying!”

And when I went to the welfare office with all the drug addicts to beg for some money for food I was told I couldn’t get anything because my husband had a registered company. “I have no food, you mean to tell me if I left my husband you would give me food money?”

“Hey, Janet, this one will leave her husband for money!”

“Well so what is new about that? Welfare witches, give me a break!”

I could not get an advance from work. I had gone from a weekly pay cheque with an agency to having my first bi monthly cheque held and coming between pay periods meant three weeks without income…

Later that day I was standing at the reception desk of our office waiting for her to get off the phone so I could tell her I needed to leave work and could she…and I fainted. I fainted from hunger.

It was hard doing filing all day long and I was so glad when I finally could get some time off before my due date. I took my son to the park. He had learned so many words! I didn’t even know how he had grown so big and smart. He fell asleep in the stroller and I carried him up to the porch. It was getting dark with clouds and we were in for a summer thunderstorm.

My neighbor, a peroxide blonde took a look at me and said, “She’s pregnant? Oh my God, they breed like cock roaches!”

I sat down on the step and started to cry. I cried really long and loud. I wanted all the neighbors on the back alleyway to hear me, each and every one who could never take the time to say “howyado” or “howrya” once, or offer my son a popsicle just because his dad didn’t look like them, just because we weren’t like them.

I prayed to the gathering storm.

“Give all your strength and power to this little one inside me, make her a force to be reckoned with!”

Somehow I made it through all of it. She was born and I could not stop laughing. I was shaking and my baby daughter was jiggling on top of me, her little mouth routing around for some milk and they hadn’t even cut the cord yet. The look of grim determination on her face was just so sweet and funny.