It was a Monday. I only know this because I looked it up on the internet. The date was March 26, 1950, and a 47 year old woman labored away in a hospital in McCook, Nebraska, to bring her sixth child into the world. The doctor told her husband that he thought the baby was dead. They couldn’t get a heartbeat and they needed now to turn their attention to saving the mother. She had delivered five other children:  all at home in her own bed with the country doctor attending. She was convinced the problems were with the hospital and insisted if they would just let her go home, she could have this baby by herself. The doctors were not convinced. The husband was adamant – they would do nothing until his daughter, the nurse, arrived.  She was on her way from Pueblo, Colorado, and she would know what to do.

My sister arrived from the big city with her “modern technology” –  a stethoscope designed to detect a baby’s heartbeat. “This baby is alive and well,” she told my mother – we just need to get it here!”  My mother was worried about my dad, pacing the hall outside her room. My sister assured her he had been tended to. “It’s okay,” she told her.  “He fainted a while ago and they have him in bed in a room down the hall.”  And so it was that my sister, Lila Rae, attended our mother as she brought me into the world. And the “new” parents, who were also grandparents twice over, began again this journey of caring for and raising a child.

By this time in her life my mother had already survived some hard times:  her fifth child Lola had contracted whooping cough when she was five days old and the raging high fever had left her with some brain damage and physical disabilities. Surely she was concerned with the health of this child now born to her 17 years later.  She had sent a son off to fight a World War and lived through the hell of the 118 days he was missing in action. She and my father had lost their farm in the Great Depression and she knew the despair of trying to feed five children with a husband out of work and no way to pay the bills or provide the necessities. But by 1950 things were looking up and though this red headed baby girl was not in the plan – they made  a new plan, welcomed her enthusiastically and maybe thought that the hard times were behind them. 

In four short years, my mother would find herself a widow with a handicapped daughter and a four year old daughter and no way to provide for them. She transitioned from a Nebraska farm wife to a single working mother and did it all with grace and with determination and it is to her credit that I never once felt like I had made her life harder instead of richer.

I was 16 the year my mother turned 63 – the age I am now. And 63 seemed so old to me.  My mother seemed old. Am I that old?  Surely not. Sixty three is the new fifty, right? But I am really only beginning to learn what by now my mother knew so well . . .  it’s not the years, it’s the mileage.

I always think of my mother on my birthday.  And of my sister.  Two  strong and beautiful women. I owe my very life to them. And I miss them.