Prompt #2 - My Birth

Prompt #2 (September 10, 2013) - My Birth


I was born in Rivers. I have always loved the sound of that. Borne in rivers. But Rivers is a town ten miles from our farm, which was five miles from our home town, Oak River, in Manitoba, Canada. I was born in Rivers, in Mrs. Madden's "nursing home" which meant a private home where pregnant women went to deliver. This was before the age of rural hospitals. I always knew that Donnie M was born there at the same time, and my Mum and his mother remembered each other. I did not know until more than 60 years later that the mother of another friend worked at that nursing home, possibly as a midwife, and thus was present at my birth. I wrote about this "coincidence" in my Dancing With Ghosts: A Cross-Cultural Education. http://www.dancingwithghostsaneducation.blogspot.ca/

I was born on December 16 and ever since, 16 has been my lucky number. I do believe that my first memory is of a field of sparkling white snow (over which we would have driven to get to the farm, possibly in a horse-drawn wagon because the snow made the route for the car impassable.) The lane into the house was not built until the year I started school.

There are photos of me swaddled and in my parents arms, with a winter woodpile and axe in the background, and more from about six months of age, by the time it got warm enough to take babe in highchair outside. This was before the age of flash.

I was lucky last Christmas when my cousin Carol from Toronto forwarded me two pieces of paper she had gleaned while sorting through some trunks belonging to our mutual maternal grandmother. My birth announcement: a small card, a circular globe with a babe bursting through, like a chick hatching. Inside, my names Joan Margaret (after my godmother, my grandmother, and my mother), the date, time 11:30 pm, and weight which I cannot decipher, perhaps 5 or 7 and three-quarters pounds? And a letter inside a birthday card sent to my Grandmother (whose birthday was May 16) written by my mother, thanking her for gifts of a baby kimono and diapers and telling her about hand-me down bonnets and dresses from my cousin, and a wee wee pot. Mum describes how I was already sleeping through the night and how I "sure was good." I joke to friends how she never in my memory said such things to me.

I don't know whether I had hair. I know my brother was bald for his first eighteen months. My eyes are green and I believe have always been, like my Mum's.

Twins: I've always felt like a twin, although technically, not. My brother next to me is only eleven months younger. Donnie M had a sister born the same year as he was, and cousin Carol is also only less than a year older than her brother. It was after the war and people were making up for lost time, for the families they had postponed while the world was at war. I also have a twin cousin, Lew, born the morning of the very same day and year. He's the smart one. I don't think there was any collusion. I was born in Manitoba nine months after my parents were married in Kettle Valley, BC, with Uncle Tom the only relative of Dad's who was able to attend. Lew was born in Peace River, Uncle Jim and Aunt Dot's second child. Also, our best friends and next door neighbours for the first ten years of my life were twins, Linda and Leila, who were born in April, between my birthday and my brother's. I think being the oldest, and the only girl, have both had more impact.