When my parents expected their first child, they were living with my father’s parents. This was a good thing because when my mother went to the hospital in labor with my sister, my father was flat on his back in another hospital across town. He had been in a streetcar accident and suffered a broken back. It was a good thing that my mother had her father-in-law, a man she adored, to accompany her. She no longer had a relationship with her own father. My grandmother had divorced him after he refused to end a long-standing affair. The whole family disowned him. Divorce was uncommon in those days, especially for Jews. I never met either of my grandfathers.
My sister Ellen was the first grandchild on both sides of the family. My father recovered fully from the accident, and when my sister was a few years old, my parents moved into their own house, less than a mile away from his parents. It was a modest row house in the Pimlico neighborhood of Baltimore, but it was all they needed. My mother suffered a few difficult years then, losing several pregnancies to miscarriage, and then enduring an even greater tragedy with the death of a baby boy several days after birth. My father was ready to give up trying to have more children. He never could bear to see her suffer. But my mother wanted another child.
Each and every one of us begins in the depths, deep in the mother’s body, held in that small watery world. When the mother moves, the baby rocks. When the mother sleeps, the baby sinks down and rests in the darkness. Or wakes up at the sudden stillness, poking and jabbing an elbow, a knee, a foot. What the baby hears is muffled, distant – the familiar hushed lilt of the mother’s voice, other voices, the perpetual drum beat of the heart, the pumping and humming of the blood, and the muted noises of the outside world. When the mother eats, the baby is nourished, everything pouring into her through the placenta and umbilical cord. But what about what the mother feels? Her fears and tension, her joys and excitement all travel through the cord with her shifting hormones.
In 1949, six and a half years after my sister was born, I entered the world. I wonder what of my mother’s losses came through the placenta to me.
In the year before I was born, my father’s father and his older brother and only sibling both died. My parents took my grandmother in; her grief was relentless and seemingly insurmountable. My mother said that her mother-in-law wept incessantly, day and night, for months, and then for years. My mother understood, as she was grieving as well, but when the never-ending crying did not abate or even lessen, she couldn’t live with it any longer. She took my grandmother to doctors for help. The only help they had to prescribe was shock therapy. And so, my mother would take her weeping mother-in-law on the city bus across town to get treatment, as this was in the days before my parents owned a car. Each time my grandmother would beg my mother not to make her go back. My mother claimed that my grandmother would be very quiet and docile on the bus ride home, but that the tears would soon start up again. My mother told her, “When you can get a grip on yourself, we’ll stop. But for now, this is what the doctors say we have to do.” At some point, the weeping ended or at least calmed sufficiently for the treatments to end. The medical world likely deemed it a success. Mission accomplished. I will never know what my grandmother lost or the terrible pain that she suffered. In other words, what damage was done in the name of healing her? It was as much if not more horror than it was healing.
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