My Father Saves My Life
When my mother first met my father, he was married to his first wife. My father was in the meat business and did very well. He was quite wealthy actually. This was in New Jersey, not Massachusetts. Now, whether it was my mother’s need to be essential, or whether my father really was not doing well in the Rose Market, the fact remains that my mother thought she had to work in the store with my father or it would not be successful, yet, somehow, before my mother and father were together, my father had been very successful. Did my mother choose to work in the store, or did she really have to? In any case, she did work in the store, and she worked hard.
One day in the store, a day like any other day, my father saw my mother take some money out of the cash register and leave the store. He was suspicious and followed her. She went a few streets away and entered a building. When my father followed her into the building, there was nowhere to go but up a long flight of stairs. There were three doors at the top of the stairs with clouded glass on the top half. One had a doctor’s name on it, and then my father knew.
He pushed the door open. No one was in the waiting room. My father pushed open another door and found my mother, just getting on a table, and a doctor there with an instrument in his hand. “Stop,� my father said. And then my father, whom I knew as dominated by my mother, pulled her out of there without another word, and so I lived to tell the story.
Before you think harshly of my mother, you have to understand that this was the only birth control she knew. In the culture in which she lived, abortion was a fact of life. Unskilled women would even perform abortions on each other with a crochet hook. Mothers would even perform abortions on their daughters. There were no thoughts about whether this was right or wrong. It just was what was done and what the women felt had to be done.
Probably what will strike you as the strangest of all is that this story was told to me when I was very young, just the way the bedtime story of Little Red Riding Hood is told to children before they fall asleep. I grew up with this story. Every time my father told me this story, it was with love. He was telling me how much I was wanted, not unwanted. He was the conquering hero who had saved his little girl, and, without whom, I would not have been born. He was the woodchopper who saved Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf.
But my father never meant for one minute to turn my mother into a villain. It was just that he was the hero. My mother was right there when my father told me the story. There was nothing but good will in my father’s telling this story. My mother would smile at the ending too.
Yet every time my father told me the story, every time, I would be in suspense to see how it would turn out. You would think I’d know, but, until my father finished the story, I held my breath. I had to hear my father say that he stopped the doctor. I had to stay awake until I heard these words. Until then, I could hardly breathe until I knew for sure the story came out right this time. Not until my father said the final words, could I take a real breath. I do not remember now what the final words were. They could have been: “And this, Glorkileh, is the story of how you were born.� Only then did I know everything was all right.
Although this story was told to me in all innocence, and although this was before psychology had become commonplace, I am not saying that growing up with this story was without its repercussions. Or, is it possible, perhaps, even if I had never heard this family story, that my relationship with my mother still would have been strained, and my breathing shallow?
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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