I was born into a moment of chaos during the last few years of the 1960’s. While some come into this world with choirs of angels singing joyful sounds of welcome, others come in through the side door unannounced. That was me. Unannounced. Unnoticed and unwelcome. My father wasn’t at the hospital pacing nervously in the waiting room. He wasn’t anticipating my arrival ready to pass out cigars holding his eighteen-month-old son with noses pressed up against the maternity wards glass awaiting a glimpse of the newest member of his tribe. No one was. My mom entered the hospital alone and left shortly after… alone.
My father had checked himself into an in-patient hospital for the mentally unstable on the day I was born. His mind heavy with looping thoughts. His mind weighted from bad decisions. His mind tormented and trapped by terrifying past memories. He didn’t want to live anymore. He couldn’t bare another day inside of himself. Even the day his only daughter came in through the side door. Unannounced. It was just too much to contain. He needed an escape from his pain.
My mother just wanted her husband back. She wanted the safety and the love only a solid marriage could provide. She needed to feel that love from the man who adored and worshiped her. She was alone for this birth. She was scared and confused being new to my father's hometown of Milford, CT. It was not her fault. She made the best decisions that her mind could handle under extreme duress. She just forgot to recognize or maybe recall that new-born love, had passed through her legs and into a world of chaos. She didn’t realize how much this new life she birthed was going to mean to her. She just didn’t understand the gravity of her situation. She is not to blame. She was my portal into this world. And I love her.
A couple of sweltering summer weeks turned the pages of the calendar from July to August. A new-born baby girl entered her family’s home for the first time. She was cranky and cried most days in a despondent plea for love and stability. Mom couldn’t understand why she wasn’t able to soothe her little baby girl. She couldn’t understand why her baby refused to bond with her now that they were finally reunited after only a few short weeks of separation. After all, she was doing her duty as a faithful wife with a toddler on her hip sitting by the bedside of her husband in the psych ward. She knew her son and husband needed her much more than her new-born. So, she had her newly appointed mother-in-law’s barren younger sister take away one less problem for her to manage that day in the hospital.
Yet, I suppose there is an infantile part of me that wants to remember this forgotten truth. An ugly truth, that wants me to remember what life was like after I was born when my father suffered his first recorded bipolar episode. I never did get all of the details from my tight-lipped mother, other than her defending her actions as justifiable. “I chose to be with my husband who just went into the psychiatric hospital and my 18-month-old who needed his mother back home. You were just a newborn so what’s the difference? I left you with your fathers’ Aunt Hazel for a few weeks to give me a break.” I actually didn’t blame her as I sat listening in on her tales of woe. How would she know the effects of abandoning her newborn at birth? Sometimes our survival instincts come swiftly and solely without careful considerations or speculations for the other.
