Finally I Was Born
The Rose Market, known as the Store, was a main character in all our lives, sort of like the first wife in China, or the other woman in America, but an other woman who had risen to preeminence and was above all.
I don’t know that it was love, but the store’s needs always came before everyone else’s needs, before my mother, my father, before all of us, before health, before my birth. The store came before everything. It was always given great deference. It was always bowed down to. In return, the store fed us. We literally did get our food from the store. There were the rich days, and there were the poor days, but the store always fed us.
All the days that my mother carried me, she worked in the store eighteen-hour days. She lugged boxes. She stood on her feet.
In those days, grocery stores were not super markets. My parents waited on each customer. There was a stick with mechanical prongs at the end that my mother used to stretch up to the top shelves to bring down a can of Campbell soup or a round box of Quaker Oats. As a customer, you had to know what you wanted, and the service you got was always with a smile.
One of my mother’s prides was that no one knew she was pregnant, except my father, of course. None of my sisters and brothers knew. None of the customers in the store knew. My mother worked so hard she didn’t gain weight, and no one could tell.
This is the story of my birth as my mother would tell it:
“Because Saturday was the biggest day of the week, I had hoped that I would be able to wait for you to be born until Saturday was over. Saturday was the biggest day of the week in the store, but, to my disappointment, at 10 a.m., I couldn’t wait any longer and had to leave the store and go home to give birth to you. You came so fast you got here before the doctor. You were so eager to be born you almost came in the hallway. You were no bigger than a teaspoon and weighed only two pounds. You were so small, it was a wonder that you lived. And you were so cute, everyone wanted to hold you, but so you could get some rest and grow, they had to leave you alone.”
This following part, my sister Sylvia who was seventeen years older than I, would tell:
“Because giving birth was a deep dark secret back then, Sid and Eleanor were locked out of the house. They banged on the door and yelled to be let in. At some point, they were let in. Sid was surprised to find you there. Eleanor was stunned. How had a baby gotten into their house?
My brother Sid who was seven at the time, would tell me later:
“Your face was round and red like a tomato.”
My Tante Lena, my mother’s sister who had no children, told this part:
“Five-year old Eleanor was so jealous that the first chance she got, she grabbed you and threw you into the fireplace — but you were so wrapped up in blankets that you didn’t get hurt. You didn’t even wake up.”
It all sounds preposterous, doesn’t it?
I was the only one of my mother’s five children that she did not nurse. When I was two weeks’ old she want back to work, and then there was a sequence of three women who took care of me until I was seven, and then there was none.
Godwriting is a blog by Gloria Wendroff and is about Gloria's daily life as the Godwriter of the Heavenletters project that is having a profound effect on the lives of people around the world.
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