The Mad Minstrel

Some people think hardship makes a hard life, and it can, but I think hardship also makes strong people and builds strong bonds.

This lesson is one I learned from my mother… with my mother.

Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one my mother conceived six times, though she only bore two children. My older brother was born in the winter of 1984 and he was my mother’s only normal delivery. Two years and one miscarriage later, I was conceived through the protection of birth control. Not yet emotionally healed from her miscarriage, she was skeptical and feared another loss.

Five uneventful months passed and, uaware of the complications it could cause, she went on a road trip that took her over the continental divide… Hello early labor! My father rushed her to a neonatal center where they were able to stop the labor and send her home on bedrest.

This is where things really get good…

My grandmother, on my father’s side, was not a pleasant woman and took great joy in meddling in the affairs of others. 

She began telling my mother that she was far too large to be five months along. She insisted there was never a miscarriage and this was a serverly overdue pregnancy. For weeks she prodded at my mother, telling her she was putting the baby in danger by not taking action. Young and scared, my mom listened to her mother-in-law and drank two ounces of castor oil to induce labor.

She’ll tell you now, that was not her best move.

The evening of the castor oil cocktail went along as any other, until three o’clock in the morning when she began having contractions that were three minutes apart.

Did I mention the hospital was a thirty-mile drive?

Twelve hours into labor, the contractions were still three minutes apart and every time she contracted my heart would stop.

Contraction, flat line heartbeat, contraction, flat line heartbeat.

Unable to stop the labor and out of options, her doctor manually broke her water and prepared to deliver. After hours of pain and hard work, my mother’s blood pressure bottomed out and she began to drift in and out of consciousness so the nurses helped by pushing on her stomach with every contraction. With the umbilical cord wrapped twice around my neck, it was a race against time before I was strangled by the pressure of the contractions.

Despite everything, on a cool October morning and weighing a mere 5.3lbs, I was born.

Yay!!!

The early years of my life were a struggle with many illnesses caused by my premature and complicated start to life and while I could have let that get me down I didn’t.

Think about it… I was conceived through birth control- before it was discovered that my mother had uterine cancer. I survived a birth that tried to kill me and I was born to a woman who almost died to bring me into this world. How could I possibly let that bring me down?

I was a fighter, born to a fighter!

We’ve been through a lot, my mother and I, sometimes more than seems fair. But that’s okay becuase I live each day knowing that my being here was never a given, it was a war that my mother and I fought, and won, together.