The Crab Chronicles

To Hell With Political Correctness

I was raised by a father who never wanted to conform, and yet if you read this about him: white male, Southern, Republican, Episcopalian, banker, suburban home, Master's degree... You would likely think he was the ultimate conformist.

You would be wrong.

We have a photo somewhere of him smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer while on water skiis.

He also loved a good dirty joke, a good vodka-tonic, and he hated pretentious people. He would have thought this was funny:

I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree because I am a lot like my dad.. except I don't drink, smoke, or tell many dirty jokes. I do not like pretentious people, however, and in these days of political correctness, I find a lot of rant material everywhere.

I say all this to preface my story of the week I had last week, where I wrestled with what to do about a stressful situation here at home. I tried to be politically correct and compassionate and I ended up stressing out to the point where I thought my head would explode.

Last Monday night, my son brought home a baby ball python in a plastic box. I guess it was a small terrarium? Not sure. Anyway, for the purposes of this story I'm going to call it a box because that's easier to type. I walked into his room to tell him good night and saw the snake, and screamed.

Michael laughed, then looked disgusted. "He's just a baby Mom. He's my new pet."

"Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?! What on earth makes you think I will allow a SNAKE in my home as a PET?" I countered, shaking.

For the next 5 minutes we had an argument about it. Michael looked so stricken when I suggested we set it free in some nice woods about 10 miles from my house, that I agreed to "think about" letting him keep it.

I thought about it, for about 24 hours. I also did research on how to care for a ball python, what they eat, how big they get, etc. In the end, I concluded that I was not going to be a politically correct mom, I was going to be the mom who was raised by Elva [a/k/a Annie Oakley] Hasty Thompson.

Jerry the snake had to go.

I didn't follow my first instinct, which was to blast the snake with my .38 or run over it with the car. No, I told Michael he needed to find a new home for Jerry.

All last week, I went into the guest room about once an hour and checked to make sure the 8 lb. weight I put on top of the box was still there, and Jerry was safely confined. I also put strapping tape on the box lid, to make sure the snake didn't push up the box lid. Years ago, my ex-sister in law's brother kept a pet snake at home and it got loose all the time and the family would find it curled up in dresser drawers. Snakes do not like to be confined.

When I was about 12 I was in the mountains with the family of my friend Joanne. We were with her stepsister and family. So there were 3 little boys and 4 grownups in a station wagon, driving around in the mountains near Gatlinburg. Suddenly the car stopped and the dad got out and picked up a snake that was lying in the road. The little boys cheered as they decided to take the snake home and put it in a terrarium. I do not recall what kind of snake it was but the dad decided it was not poisonous or harmful. Nonetheless, I was terrified. The snake was placed in a brand new casserole dish, in the back of the station wagon, and the lid was placed on the dish and we continued on the way back to Knoxville. It was a cold night. A little while later, I felt something nudge my right thigh and tried to ignore it. I felt another nudge. I was sitting next to Joanne on the "rumble seat" that folded down in the old station wagons. I asked the grownups to turn on the car light for a moment, and stood up and looked, and there was the snake, curled under my thigh. I screamed and leaped into the front seat of the car. Fortunately, the dad who was driving didn't wreck the car. I was shaking and crying the rest of the way home.

My parents were startled when I told them what happened.

Years later, when my parents lived in a house on Melton Hill Lake near Knoxville, my mother saw a long snake in the driveway one afternoon. She went in the house and grabbed her pistol and shot the snake numerous times. Then she made herself a drink and waited on Dad to get home from work and dispose of the body. That, I was taught, was the correct way to approach a snake sighting: grab a pistol and blast away.

So my history with snakes has to do with fear and trauma.

Friday afternoon, Michael came home with a live mouse in a small box and informed me that "Jerry" needed to eat. Michael paid $4.58 for a food mouse. The thought of putting that snake and a mouse in a large cardboard box just made my stomach churn. I called a reptile rescue group. They said they would come get the snake and find a lovely adoptive home for him. Michael refused to entertain the idea.

I had to get ugly about it. Finally, Michael found a friend who would keep the snake but allow Michael to come see him.

 

Michael is lucky I am a small women and completely incapable of killing anything larger than a bug. Nonetheless, until he took the snake out of here on Friday, I was sitting here pondering ways to kill the snake. I knew Elva would approve, if she knew, which she didn't. That's another reason the snake had to go. Mom knew I was upset about something but I couldn't bring myself to tell her about the snake. She would have been freaked out.

After another argument on Friday afternoon, I told Michael if I ever see another snake in my house, ever, I will not say a word. I will just immediately KILL IT.

How can that be avoided? Just don't bring one in my house.

About 4:15 Friday, Michael finally put the snake and the mouse and a large cardboard box on the passenger seat of his car, with me watching, and then took out the snake to hold in his lap while driving down the road. Noting the look of horror on my face, he flashed me a peace sign, and drove off.

Now, the politically correct parent would have handled the whole situation a lot better, I've no doubt.

I decided living with snake stress -- which was interfering greatly with my peace of mind -- was too much. I was not going to be politically correct. So be it.

One day I will laugh about this. Not any time soon, however...

Let's All Calm Down About The 2016 Race for the White House

In all my life I have never seen a more divisive presidential race. I have had to bite my tongue on Facebook and I've tried not to post anything on my wall indicating who I will vote for, but my choice is - as always, it seems - a choice between what I see as the lesser of two evils. I do not embrace the candidate I will vote for because well... the candidate I really liked had to drop out of the race. [No, it wasn't Bernie.]

However, I suspect many people feel the way I do. It's not the end of the world. Everyone needs to calm down. Seriously.

This morning I was watching a story on CBS Sunday Morning on New York Times columnist Maureen O'Dowd and it was amusing, in some instances, when her sister talked about voting for candidates of different parties, in different years. My parents usually voted Republican, but not always. I recalled times when my parents didn't agree on who to vote for, and Dad would get mad and tell Mom not to vote because, he said, his vote would cancel hers out. By that logic, nobody should vote.

I have voted for Democrats and I have voted for Republicans. I try to ignore the party and focus on the candidate, and try to figure out who is the best human being, not who is running the best campaign. That's not always easy to do.

One thing that I have found very helpful this year is this website, Vote411. Every year I vote I find things on the ballot that puzzle me, and I mentally castigate myself for not doing more research. Well, click that link. It's an awesome resource for learning what you need to know before you go to the polls. Thank you, League of Women Voters.

Not everyone wants to thoughtfully research candidates. Lots of people want to simply rely on what they see on political ads, or the daily newspaper, or the nightly news broadcast. WRONG. Every single network - NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX - they ALL have agendas. There is no such thing as journalistic integrity or objectivity. And guess what?! There NEVER WAS. [I'm sorry, Mrs. B, my high school newspaper sponsor, but journalism is as flawed as any other human endeavor, and it always has been.] I read a lot of newspapers from 1922 once, researching a project, and they were awful. Yellow journalism at its finest...

We all have to learn and remember that journalism is totally biased.

I worked for the Knoxville Journal for nearly a year when I was a senior in high school. We had the old-fashioned AP and UPI teletypes and news rolled in 24 hours a day, tons of stories. The managing editor decided which ones to run. News folks pick and choose their stories, based on personal opinions, audience preferences, perhaps other things. If a network is owned by a conglomerate that also owns a food company and some of the food is found to be contaminated, the news network may choose to ignore that story, or downplay it. Another network may run a lengthy piece on it.

This year, however, is different from any previous year because the country is so divided. Hillary supporters passionately hate Trump. Trump supporters passionately hate Hillary. There are couples around the country who are breaking up because one is for Trump and the other is for Clinton. Yes, BREAKING UP. Apparently nobody taught them the fine art of how to disagree amicably.

I am not immune, sadly. I have a friend that won't speak to me right now because we are supporting different candidates. I have Facebook friends who have "un-friended" me and I suspect some of those are because they suspect I do not support their candidate.

So who is going to win on November 9th? I don't know. I won't predict.

Apparently, the polls this year are unreliable. I would have said that long before today - keeping in mind the quote about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" [Will Rogers, I think].

My original premise is simple. This year we are seeing an incredibly dirty mudslinging race. We have nobody but ourselves to blame for that. Don't blame the candidates. They are simply going all out to win, and as recent history has taught us, that means slinging mud. In this day and age of constant photos and videos all over the place, there are no secrets any more, especially for public figures.

Politics shouldn't end relationships or marriages or even friendships, however.

We should be able to laugh at ourselves. We SHOULD.

Who do we listen to when it comes to voting, though? Why, entertainers and actors, of course!

Entertainers all over the place are threatening to leave the USA and/or "move to Canada" if Trump gets elected. I'm not surprised at all that the recent show in Tampa sparked this article: Hundreds Walked Out as Amy Shumer Gets Political. (My personal feeling is that she is not at all funny or talented, and I am amazed anyone would pay anything to watch her, but that's not really based on her politics.)

Comedians being political is nothing new. Anyone remember George Carlin? He was often political. Sometimes it was funny, sometimes not. I usually watched clips of his shows and either laughed and thought "how clever" or I sat there and seethed, thinking he was being utterly unfair. I didn't like everything he had to say, but so what? I've never met another human being I agreed with entirely. Very few people I've ever known were as brilliant and/or funny as Carlin.

I watched a clip of Trump and Hillary speaking at the Al Smith Dinner last week. Good thing they can laugh at themselves, unlike many of the rest of us. Afterwards, they reportedly shook hands and agreed that whoever gets elected, they will need to work together afterwards. I hope they were sincere.

See, here's where I am going to turn really cynical, so brace yourself.

I don't think it matters much who gets elected. Celebrities may flee to Canada. Or not. Marriages may crumble. Or not.

Both candidates this year are very flawed and whoever gets elected, I will sit back and watch with great cynicism, frankly, because they aren't going to be crowned for life.

Whatever they SAID during their campaign will mean little. They can SAY anything during an election. What they say is almost meaningless.

What we all need to calm down and remember is that presidents don't get in office and rule like potentates. The founding fathers set things up so no one branch of government - executive, legislative, or judicial - has too much power. Congress can pass a bill and send it up the road and the president can veto it. Sometimes vetoes get overridden. Presidents can be impeached. Presidents can resign. If we have a president who is one party and the majority in Congress is the other party, little will likely get done.

Kids in school now don't get a thorough knowledge of history or civics, and that's tragic. In order to not go crazy this year, we all need to study history.

I have thought often during this campaign about President Johnson, LBJ. He was a consummate politician. He cursed like a sailor and screwed women in the White House, asking the Secret Service to help him elude his wife. He gave interviews completely in the nude, or sitting on the toilet. Biographers have a field day with him.

As one biographer stated about LBJ: "URINATING in a sink, inviting people into his bathroom, showing off his abdominal scar, exposing his private parts: after a while nothing surprises a biographer of Lyndon Baines Johnson... Sexual conquests also helped to fill the void. He was a competitive womanizer. When people mentioned Kennedy's many affairs, Johnson would bang the table and declare that he had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose."

However, he was able to marshal bipartisan support and pass important legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. He pushed for legislation that was part of the Great Society, which had a huge impact on our country. He started Medicare and Head Start.

"The first piece of Great Society legislation, the Economic Opportunity Act 1964, tried to give people tools to get out of poverty. The bill created a Job Corps similar to the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps; a domestic peace corps; a system for vocational training; and Head Start, a pre-school program designed to prepare children for success in public school. The bill also funded community action programs and extended loans to small businessmen and farmers.

In 1964, 8 million American adults had not finished 5 years in school; more than 20 million had not finished eight years; and almost a quarter of the nation's population, around 54 million people, hadn't finished high school. In 1965, Congress passed the groundbreaking Elementary and Secondary Education Act which for the first time provided federal funding for education below the college level passed the Higher Education Act, which created a National Teachers Corps and provided financial assistance to students wishing to attend college."

SO... LBJ was a real jerk, a foul-mouthed womanizer, and he escalated Vietnam, but he was not 100% bad. He also did a lot of good.

Therein lies the rub. It's complicated. Politicians can be total jerks, awful, and yet good.

Just like everybody else..

photo by Linda Harris

Ten Ways Things Have Changed Since I Was a Kid

OK kids, here's how you know I am old. I grew up in the 60's and 70's. I just thought I'd make a list, for posterity... and because I want future generations to know stuff about us that is not tainted by political correctness. Was everything wonderful back then? No. There were certainly issues. I worried more than I should have about whether or not my bellbottomed jeans were the right width, or whether or not I had enough allowance money to buy the new Partridge Family album, but I was not traumatized...

CLOWNS - when I was a kid they were happy, joyous creatures. I was never afraid of them. They didn't attack anybody.

HALLOWEEN -- We had a Halloween Carnival at church every year, not a "Fall Festival." Nobody decided to worship Satan as a result.

My brother and I walked from house to house and asked for candy. Nobody gave us anything but candy. My parents never freaked out about it. We'd run all over the neighborhood, come home and empty out all the candy in front of the TV and sit and eat most of it, get a bellyache, maybe throw up, and that was it until next year. Our "costumes" came from Woolworths or K-Mart or we made our own.

CHRISTMAS -- We said Merry Christmas to each other, and to store clerks, and classmates at school. Nobody freaked out and called the ACLU.

PLAYING -- I asked my mother the other day "What would you have said if I had asked you to arrange a "playdate"?" She just snorted. If I had to be carried somewhere in the car to "play" it was probably at the house where Mom was friends with the mother and that was the reason for the visit, not my "playdate." She didn't care if I liked the kid, either. I had to be polite and behave.

On a typical day after school we went outside and played until it got dark. Then we went home for dinner. If our mothers wanted us for some reason they went outside and hollered. If we didn't answer they called the neighbors until they found us. No big deal. [Now, you drive through my suburban neighborhood and there are NO KIDS anywhere on a school day. What happened to playing outside?]

PEANUTS - We ate peanut butter sandwiches all the time, and we ate peanuts. Nobody ever had to be rushed to the hospital. The big discussion was about what jelly went best with peanut butter, not whether or not there was an Epi Pen nearby.

BIRTHDAY PARTIES -- My parents didn't ever do anything big -- usually it was a cake, a few presents, and the family, around the dining room table. A few times were special. For my 6th, I had some friends over for lunch and we played games. For my 16th, I had a few friends over and we ate M&Ms and potato chips in the basement, and listened to Saturday Night Fever, and giggled.  Total cost, less than $20.

I never went to a party expecting to get a gift for attending the party. I took a gift to the birthday boy or girl - usually something that we got at Woolworth's. [If you don't know what a Woolworths was, you are very young.]

TV -- It never occurred to my parents to censor what we watched on TV. Hogan's Heroes, I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan's Island and even MASH or All in the Family -- none of those shows corrupted us or caused visits to the therapist. We had three channels, and for most of my childhood only two sets. I never had a TV set in my room.

RESPECT -- We were taught to be respectful and polite to adults, always. If I "talked back" to my parents or any other adult, I got punished. Not "consequenced," PUNISHED. I might have to go to my room - that was for my mom's peace of mind. If I was really naughty she might say "Go cut me a little switch." Nobody called Child Protective Services. I usually deserved what I got, as did my brother.

I addressed anyone other than my parents as Mr., Mrs., or Miss. If I misbehaved at school, my parents didn't threaten to sue the school. They did believe us, however, if we protested we didn't do it. There was an unspoken deal - we told the truth and Mom and Dad stuck by us. They were never rude to our teachers, though.

BED - I went to bed early every night. I was in bed by 8 in elementary school and by 9 in middle school. It never occurred to me to think I was being persecuted. I listened to the radio or read a book under the covers, like previous generations, and fell asleep when I was ready. If I got out of bed more than once I was usually threatened with a spanking, by my dad.

BLAME -- I never blamed anyone else for anything, except possibly my brother. A high premium was placed on "admitting wrongdoing." Nowadays kids seem to lie and blame a lot.

 

Was it a more innocent time? Undoubtedly. I loved playing outside. I loved swimming, water skiing, tennis, shooting baskets, and playing foursquare and kickball. I learned how to garden and sew and knit and cook a simple meal - all before I went to high school. Is anyone teaching these skills today to their kids? I don't know.

I guess every generation learns the things that seem important at that time..

me at my 6th birthday party

Catching Up

I have not written in a while and so this will be a catching up post. There has not been a whole lot going on but I will try to hit the highlights for you.

Thanks be to GOD that the hot hot weather is over. Right now we are having highs in the 70's. Next week we're supposed to have a couple of days when it's 84 and I dread those days but oh well.

 

Mother had her first appointment yesterday with the cardiologist who also sees me. This group is about 10 minutes from the house and you can park at the door and walk in. The other pacemaker folks were at Northside and that's 20+ minutes and I have to park in a deck. That may not sound bad but I have to get mother out and put her in the wheelchair, then go park, then walk back and get her up to the office. Afterwards I have to again leave her at the curb and go get the car from the deck, etc. It's just a pain. It also entails navigating I-285, which I hate. My cardiologist is a great guy, very approachable, and Mom likes him. He will see her every six months. Yesterday she did really well with the pacemaker check at the office, and she liked Dr. S - who told her since she made it past 80 she may well live to see 100! She just glared at him and said I DO NOT WANT to live that long! I think he was startled..

I was tempted to say "Doc, she has shoes older than you," but I didn't.

 

I am working on some blogs for business clients, and also still doing some creative writing. I have several fiction stories now, short stories, which I think are fairly decent. I am still honing those short story skills, however.

 

Michael is going to start a little business painting designs on tennis shoes. He is such a talented artist. I am pretty excited about this. He may also paint some caps, tee shirts, aprons - we shall see.

 

I called yesterday about refinancing the house, since interest rates are lower. The bank must have notified another bank that has our home equity line of credit, because today I got a letter form them saying they want our business. It came UPS and was left at the front door. When I see an unexpected letter like that it does NOT fill me with joy and excitement. Quite the opposite. It worries me. I opened it and read it and thought nope, you're not getting my business now, even though I am shopping around a bit. Jeez louise...

POLITICAL DISGUST

I keep a running To Do list on my desk and I am so happy that starting next week I can go to the Tucker Recreation Center and go ahead and vote. Early voting ROCKS! I hate doing it on election day and standing in some horrible long line.

Like many of my friends, I am also sick to death of political ads and political squabbles. I turn off the ads. I couldn't watch 10 minutes of the last debate. It has gotten very, very ugly and I hate it. What I pray is simply Lord, let the right person get elected, and give them wisdom and good judgment. I think that's really all that can be done at this point...

MOVIES

Michael and I watched the newest Tom Hanks movie A Hologram for the King the other night and it was a disappointment. Hanks was great, but the movie was just sort of disjointed and weird. It looks like, on the previews, a comedy. It's not. Very few laughs are in it. It's a character piece, but the Hanks character is just out of focus and odd. I didn't care for it.

There's a new World War II movie coming out soon called Allied, with Brad Pitt. I like WWII movies and this is a spy story and a love story, so win-win as far as I'm concerned. Bruce told me the movie Fury  was good and I didn't believe him. I didn't really want to watch a movie about a tank unit in WWII but I watched it and thought it was really excellent. Pitt usually chooses well-written projects.  / I am really tired of all the news coverage of Pitt's divorce. Leave those people alone. Divorce is painful enough, especially when there are kids. Just leave them alone already. I'm tired of that story.

That's all the news I know..

 

Happy Columbus Day?

My great great grandfather was a man named CC Phillips, or Christopher Columbus Phillips. I am pretty sure we are not related to the famous explorer Columbus, however. [History now indicates Columbus was not really the discoverer of America but was a racist jerk - read more here...]

No, Grandaddy Phillips was, according to Find A Grave:

"...a pioneer builder of this town and throughout his life held a position of one of the leaders in all community activities. He was a deacon in the Acworth Baptist church and a Christian gentleman. He is survived by his wife, Mrs. Nannie A. Phillips; and four daughters, Mrs. R.E. Butler of Marietta; Miss Alma Phillips, Mrs. M.A. Goodwin and Miss Mildred Phillips, of Acworth."

He was in the Civil War. He was a Private in COMPANY A (ACWORTH INFANTRY), 18TH REGIMENT,GEORGIA VOLUNTEER INFANTRY, ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, C.S.A. Mom remembers seeing his uniform and sword, passed down through the family.

I grew up being told the Civil War was "the War Between the States." Southerners have long memories. I was born in 1962, more than 100 years after the War started.

My grandmother [C.C. Phillips' granddaughter Wilma] was joking around with her brother-in-law once when he was examining Grandaddy Phillips' Civil War sword. Harvey was from Boston Massachusetts. He said "Your sword here has a bunch of nicks in it." 

Mamaw replied "Every one of them came from cutting a Yankee head off."

Now whether that was true, who knows. Doubtful. I think she just said it to rile him.

Anyway, back to C.C. Phillips. After the war he became a successful businessman and raised four daughters. His daughter Mildred never married. She wanted to marry, but her father disapproved of the match, so she just never married anyone. Instead, she became a career woman, at a time when that was unusual. Mother described Mildred as "a wild Indian." Mother said "He had every man his four daughters dated or got serious about investigated by a detective. He told Mildred the man ran around and slept with whores and had VD. I think he just said that to keep her from marrying. That was probably not true. Grandaddy was a snob. So Mildred said if she couldn't marry the man she loved she'd never marry at all, and she didn't. She was very smart. She was well-educated, for that time. She worked. One of her jobs was as a detective - don't know for whom. She was undercover. Mother and the sisters would talk about it and purse their mouths and roll their eyes. They didn't know where Mildred worked. She was a tall, broad woman with bright red hair.

Daddy donated blood to her after an accident. Mildred was about to die. They had the same type blood. It was very rare. They joked about it for years - he said she we're related now. You've got my blood." [Of course, they were related by marriage because he was married to Mildred's niece. "Daddy" refers to Bob Hasty, Mom's daddy and my grandfather.]

My grandfather's blood type was so rare that Atlanta hospitals used to call him to come donate when there was an accident. "They got him out of bed at 3 a.m. from time to time, to come to the hospital. He felt he had no choice to go and donate." Mamaw wasn't too crazy about him being pulled out of bed at all hours but he felt it was his duty.

I wrote a short story recently about C.C.'s daughter Beulah Phillips Butler, a fictional story but based loosely on her life. After I finished it I thought to myself, I will never run out of things to write about, because just the family stories are a wealth of material...

 

The Destructor

Remember the other day I wrote about a friend of Mike's becoming a dad? Well, I decided it would be a good idea for him to bring his puppy to us to look after since they were spending so much time at the hospital and the puppy was all alone for hours. So on Monday afternoon we got her.

Let me just say this from the outset: I have had many dogs in my life. From pound dogs to bassetts we have always had a dog. For some years, my parents had three dogs. They lived on the lake and there was plenty of land for them to run around on.

The puppy, however, has been a tornado of canine destruction and mayhem. She is half pit bull, half boxer. Three months old.

She is not fully housebroken. Fortunately, we need to get the family room carpet cleaned soon anyway. She turned over my drink twice last night and then tried to eat the cup, which is fortunately plastic. I only drink water, so no major carpet mishap there, just annoyance.

We weren't sure how Lola would react, but she has been unfailingly kind and tolerant of the puppy.

Lola was an older dog when we adopted her, a rescue. She has accidents now and then but mostly she's housebroken. The dog before her, Coco, had medical issues and we couldn't take her outside, so I spent a lot of time cleaning the floors. So did Mom, the kids, all of us.

Before Coco, I had not puppy parented in some years. Especially not a live wire like this puppy. We have gone through two rolls of paper towels in less than two days.

Her favorite thing to do is try and chew Lola's tail. Lola tolerates this with great patience.

These are some of the things she has mistaken for chew toys:

my Teva sandal

my shoes that I was wearing at the time [hard to walk when a puppy is biting your shoes]

the TV remote control

electrical cords

my bongo drums

my foot

a kleenex, and several paper towels and napkins [she loves paper ripping]

my bathrobe

the mail

Lola's bed

the sofa in the family room

Michael thinks she is adorable, but he is not here most of the time. I actually work from home, I've had to remind him. Hard to get work done when you're trying to watch a puppy and keep her form destroying the house.

She goes home late this afternoon, thanks be to God.

 

Baby Stories

Michael is growing up fast today. He got a call this morning that his friend's wife was in labor, and he picked up her sister and gave her a ride to the hospital. The baby was born this afternoon, about 6 weeks early. He weighs 4 lbs., though, so hopefully he will be OK. That's not too tiny, IMHO.

Mike's friend and his wife are very young, and I am praying they can manage taking care of a premature infant. The baby will have to be in the hospital for weeks before he can go home.

Mother and I started talking about babies and stories. Even though I've never given birth, I know a lot of baby stories.

The first one came from a friend of mine who got married young and had her first baby when I was still in college. I remember how strange it felt that this person who had been a friend of mine for years, since third grade, was now going to produce another human being from her tiny body. Sometime after the baby arrived we had a long phone conversation. I was in Athens and she was living up north, many miles from where she grew up in Tennessee. She made a point of telling me all about the episiotomy.**

I was completely and utterly HORRIFIED. It sounded like something out of a bad movie. Then she described the labor pain in graphic detail. I thought I might throw up. Oh My GOD. I cannot lie, I probably made a subconscious decision that day that adoption would be my best option, although that didn't happen for many years.

When I was a kid, in some sex ed class somewhere [it was the 70's and I had to set through such classes in school, girl scouts, church, maybe another one somewhere. They all kind of blur together in my mind now.] I was forced to sit through a birth film showing a baby born underwater, to a hippie couple, in a lagoon, and I remember being stunned and grossed out. Great film for encouraging birth control.

Skip ahead. When I finished college and started working in an office, one of my co-workers got pregnant. I bought a cute little baby outfit and went to the baby shower. There were SO MANY baby products there - and this was in 1986. Mind blowing. I never knew babies needed so much STUFF.

The baby tub and washcloth seemed unneccessary. My mother bathed me in the kitchen sink for years. I actually remember sitting in the sink [a big old farmhouse sink] until I was about 3 years old, happy as a clam, while Mom fixed dinner.

We actually have a home movie somewhere of Mom bathing me in the sink. Nowadays she would probably be shunned by the Minivan Mafia. The sink was always carefully washed before and after each bath. Plus, I was exceedingly healthy.

I felt like an utter idiot at that first ever baby shower. Not long before that, my cousin gave birth to her first baby and I was so excited, since she was the first grandchild on that side of the family. I went to the bookstore in Athens and bought her a tiny Georgia Bulldogs cheerleader outfit and mailed it off. Several years later I found out the outfit was for a two year old, not an infant. I felt like an idiot. [Said baby is now grown and has three children of her own. Wow, I feel OLD.]

My mother is an oracle when it comes to baby stories. She can sit and talk for hours, and her stories are always interesting. I will think I've heard all the stories and suddenly she will come out with a new one.

Not long ago, she told me that when she was born in 1933 both her older brothers had whooping cough. My grandparents had to keep Mom upstairs and the boys downstairs for a couple of weeks until they were well.

The doctor who delivered me, Dr. Watson, delivered more than 15,000 babies in his 60 year career. He and his family lived next door to my aunt and uncle in North Augusta. When he had been in practice for decades, he went to the high school football game with his wife one night and studied the football roster carefully. Then he turned to his wife and said "I delivered every player on the team!" [BTW, if you want to hear a genuine, beautiful southern accent, play the video in that story. He was 101 years old when it was made.]

The night before I was born Mom and Dad went to a John Wayne movie. I sat through many more John Wayne movies after that, because my dad loved The Duke, but at least my view was better in later years.. [I still love The Quiet Man.]

I wrote a short story recently and a couple of friends who read it asked me about why a woman in the story couldn't get pregnant. The character is a long distance runner with very low body fat. In that situation, most runners stop ovulating and then cannot get pregnant. If a woman has a great body for running [slim hips] that makes pregnancy and birth even more difficult. I know these things because of all the stories I've heard over the years. I had a cousin who had trouble conceiving because she was a runner, and very thin.

I am always amazed at birth stories that involve long labor or back labor. To me, these stories are far more frightening than any horror movie I've ever seen. Those movies are fake. Births are REAL.

I have a feeling that I would have been a huge coward if I'd ever given birth. I would have likely been screaming for an epidural even before the conception...

Birth stories have always fascinated me, though. Women's bodies are engineering marvels. My maternal grandmother, who stood 4'11, gave birth to three big healthy babies, the last one [my mom] when she was 34. A friend of mine who is 5'11, and a large, big-boned lady, has one son. Her body looks like it was custom-made for easy birthing, BUT the birth was so perilous they had to do a C-section. She told me that story one night when we were eating dinner in a restaurant, in graphic detail, and most of my dinner went home in a doggy bag..

 

I like to think that we are all reincarnated. Maybe one day, in a future lifetime, I will have a biological child, and by then it science will have made it painless and easy. Think about it. We all walk around with tiny computers in our hands. We've put human beings on the moon to walk around. We have electric cars. Paralyzed people and amputees can now use bionics to restore limbs.

BUT IT STILL HURTS TO GIVE BIRTH!

Somebody needs to fix that.

 

 

**An episiotomy is a surgical cut in the muscular area between the vagina and the anus (the area called the perineum) made just before delivery to enlarge your vaginal opening.