"Happy Day"

Every May 10 since Mom and Dad died, I do the same thing.  I observe their wedding anniversary -- today, the 74^th.  And I reflect on the beginning of my life, my conception.

You see, I was born exactly nine months and two weeks after the day they were married.  Do the math!  As a friend remarked, “You were wanted.”   Pause.  “Or you were a surprise.” 

I dare to think I was a fulfillment.

Between May 1952 and February 1953, Mom and Dad went so quickly from being individuals to a pair of newlyweds to expectant parents. They were barely “Just married!” before they were married-with-a-baby-on-the-way.   (Was such a placard attached to the bumper of the car that took them away from the reception to their first night together?)  Were they “enjoying the present moment” or already consumed with what the future held?  Did the first flush of getting to know each other end abruptly when they knew Mom was pregnant, or did they continue to bask in the glow of their dearest hope coming to fruition? 

I wish I knew more about that brief but important time in my parents’ lives.  And because today is also Mother’s Day, I wish I knew more about Mom’s specific experiences. 

Had she taken to sex as easily as her body took to conception?  How soon did she know she was pregnant?  Did she have morning sickness?  Cravings?  Strange dreams?  What worried her?  Was it an easy pregnancy?  What was I like?  Was I active?  Was she surprised at being kicked and poked from inside the womb? 

Did she and I have a relationship beyond our physical connection?  Did she talk to me?  Did she intuit that I was a girl?  Did she have any idea, as I was being formed physically, that the patterns of my psychology, my spirituality, my creativity and everything else that makes me “me” were also being laid down?  

Why didn’t I ever ask these questions?  Would Mom have answered them?  She hated invasions of privacy, and that is surely how my questions would have landed.

Is there a larger reason I never asked?  Even when I was pregnant and we could have reveled in the shared experience, compared notes -- I never asked.  Why didn’t she ask me any questions either?  Were we  afraid to open ourselves to such mother-daughter, woman-woman intimacies? 

Why am I so curious only now?  Do I expect answers from beyond?

I once asked Mom and Dad what might have been my name instead of “Susan."  The answer: “Barbara."  Well, that would have been fine, but why either name?  They merely said, “We liked them both.”  Did “Susan” become the choice because, somehow, they cooperated with the prophetic truth that I was already known and named? Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born, I dedicated you.    (Jeremiah1:4)  From my mother’s womb, he gave me my name, formed me as his               servant. (Isaiah 49:1,5) 

When I was probably too young for it, before age ten or so, I discovered The Blue Bird, a surrealist play written by Maurice Maeterlinck in 1908. Raised in literate household, I had been an early reader and became avid about books; no one worried about my level of understanding.  Of all the fantastical scenes in that mysterious classic (which I still possess), I took to heart those set in the Kingdom of the Future, in the midst of the children who are not yet born. ... It is from here that all the children come who are born upon our Earth. From that Kingdom, the character called Time escorts the new children and their gifts -- for all the children bring gifts with them -- to the ship that will bear them to Earth.  As they travel, the children can hear issuing forth a distant song of gladness and expectation ... the song of the mothers coming out to meet them.

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad.  Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.