You Never Know by W. D. Foster-Graham

Author:W. D. Foster-Graham [Foster-Graham, W. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781546257530
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2018-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

Douglass Merrill Edwards

Whenever Mom was angry with me about something, she never failed to drag out “the story” of December 7, 1959—the night I was born. Eleven inches of snow were on the ground, the blowing and drifting kind that had fallen the day before. The temperature was -21. Wind-chill factors weren’t in common usage in weather reports back then, but Mom dramatically griped about how it felt like -50 outside. On top of that, I was two weeks overdue. Nothing was going right for her, she moaned. Dad took forever digging the car out from all the snow and getting the ice scraped off the windows and windshield. He drove too slowly to the hospital, and it was his fault for fishtailing on ice patches along Park Avenue when she screamed at him to speed up. The hospital room was too cold—I would have given her that one if it had been the old Hennepin County General Hospital, but Swedish Hospital was in better shape. The nurses didn’t get her ice water when she wanted it. And then, of course, there were the graphic descriptions of the thirty-two hours of gut-wrenching pain she endured. Growing up, I continued to be amazed at how frequently she managed to tell me this story while I was eating.

Personally, I thought Mom lived for the drama of that day. It was something to hold over my head for the rest of her life. She had a heavy alto voice, the kind that reverberated off the walls. According to her, the staff on the maternity ward had to wear earplugs from all the screaming she did in there. When I arrived at 9:30 p.m. that night, she grumbled that it was my fault I weighed nine pounds, ten ounces. Well, maybe not entirely—she blamed Dad for that, too, given the Edwards track record.

When I was still living at home, I almost begged her to take out the belt and spank me—that was more, shall I say, merciful than hearing “the story.” When Darius came along three years later, there were some variations. Since he was born in August, the temperature was 97, and the air conditioning in the car broke down. She was in labor twenty-six hours, and he weighed in at ten pounds, three ounces. In other words, he was a sitting duck for “the story.” In later years, if Mom did this at family gatherings, Uncle Eli or Auntie Donna would step in and say, “Xenobia, give it a rest,” and that would be the end of it. Dad would take her aside sometimes, as well, but then she’d lay into him.

No, no, no. No kids for me, and no marriage, I promised myself. If that was what I had to look forward to, I wasn’t having it. Dad was a cool dude to know, but even though she was Mom, I didn’t understand why he had married her. Dad waited a little longer to get married than Auntie Debbi and Uncle Eli, and he was already doing well working for Grandpa.

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