Encounter with a stranger I never saw again

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The woman was sobbing as they rolled my gurney into the hospital room.  Her curtain was pulled so I couldn’t see her, but her sobs would have been heartbreaking had I not been in a state of euphoria.

I had just given birth to my miracle baby.  It was a miracle we conceived him.  It was a miracle when I sensed something wrong and went to my OB’s office.  It was a miracle my OB was out of town and another doctor with much smaller hands ended up tying the knot in the cervical cerclage stitch that closed my cervix and kept me pregnant.  It was a miracle that I was in labor for 9 weeks and the drugs kept me pregnant long enough for him to be viable.  It was a miracle that he was born 9 ½ weeks early and suffered little complications.  That’s no big deal now, but in 1985 that was a miracle.

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Barbie

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Barbie’s birthdate is March 9, 1959.  I was born a bit later on August 3rd.  Barbie has always been with me.  Good or bad, she has been woven into the cultural zeitgeist of this here baby boomer.

Photo by Sandra Gabriel on Unsplash

Of course, I had Barbies, but I think my mom was more into her than I was.  My mom made my Barbie clothes.  For Christmas one year, I got a whole box.  It seems Mom spent her days while I was in school making tiny evening gowns.

It was impossible during my youth, to put girls of a certain age together without the dolls coming out  When I was 10, I had a book of short stories about Barbie as a high school student.  Funny, I always thought her much older.  What high school student in the 60s traipsed around in stiletto mules and ballgowns all the time?

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The Vanilla Milkshake

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The first time I ever went to a drive-in theater with a date, I arrived home with a lifelong dislike of vanilla milkshakes.

I don’t remember his name or him asking me out or anything about the event other than his vanilla milkshake and his tongue halfway down my throat. I was repulsed in so many ways and just wanted to go home but was too young and too stupid and too fucking polite to tell him to stop. I was raised in an era and by people who believed women were put on earth to please men. To placate them. To serve them. And to diminish ourselves in the process.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

We were double dating, or it easily would have become a date rape scene. Or perhaps, had we been alone, I would have pushed him away. The women’s movement was burgeoning, but in those early days, it was about sexual liberation not me too.

At least it wasn’t chocolate. I would hate to have had that disastrous date affect my lifelong love of chocolate milkshakes (and malts.) Small mercies.

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Visiting and Revisiting the Ghost of Who I Was

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If I were to put on Wind Song perfume, I would remember that once upon a time I was 16 and insecure and made shy by circumstances that changed my life dramatically on my 15th birthday.   The circumstances, really, are not important.  One just needs to know that I was uprooted, again, and moved to a locale where I knew no one and no one knew me.  That was not a new experience, but these new kids were not military brats.  They did not welcome me with open arms.  They were not unkind.  I was simply someone they didn’t know in a tight-knit community at an age where one doesn’t really socialize outside their tribe.

I had no tribe. I was invisible.

I did have the third floor of a brick house as bedroom to myself.  As do teenagers, I spent hours holed up in my attic.  The princess in exile in the tower.

I can slip into the steaming hot water of the claw footed bathtub and wash my hair with Herbal Essence shampoo.  Luxuriating in the warmth and comfort of the water while tears silently slip down my face.  Another lonely day is about to begin at school.  More than a year’s worth now. 

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