“A Time to Remember,” column for June 5, 2012

Out of the blue, he asked me a question about a moment we shared years ago, he and I, a moment so momentous we would never be the same.
I remembered it, of course. How could I forget? I’d sooner forget my name. But that’s not what he was asking. He knew I hadn’t forgotten it. He just wondered what time it took place?
What time? As in minutes?
It was only a random question, he said, nothing important.
I smiled. He had no idea how important it was to me. Or how much it would haunt me, keep me awake, flipping dusty, dog-eared pages of my mind, trying to find the answer.
What kind of mother forgets what time her child was born? It’s not like I wasn’t there. Yes, I had a few distractions. I didn’t check my watch. But still ….
Here’s what I do recall.
I was 23 years old, married for nearly three years, living 3,000 miles from my family in a town so new and unfamiliar I’d get lost going to the grocery store. My husband had recently started teaching and coaching at a local high school. We had health insurance and a steady paycheck. We bought a house for about two years’ worth of his salary. It would shelter our family for the next 35 years.
I was absolutely over the moon to be pregnant. All my life, I had wanted to be a mother (a grandmother, too, but first things first.) And while I’d had little hands-on experience with children, I had done a lot of reading and had no doubt I was ready for whatever lay in store.
Basically, I had no clue. It didn’t matter. What I didn’t know, the boy would teach me.
On the day he was due to be born, his father had to coach a basketball game. At half-time, I was sitting in the bleachers, like a whale riding a see-saw, when I felt the first contraction.
I sent a note to the coach in the locker room: “In labor, might need to leave.’’
Minutes later it came back: “In foul trouble, game over soon.”
The game went into overtime. When his team finally lost, I had to bite my fist not to cheer. We went home to get my bag and a burrito for the coach, then drove to the hospital in the same car the boy would drive 16 years later to get his driver’s license.
By 2 a.m., I was in hard labor. Or so I thought. Then it got harder. The nursing assistant was a woman whose son had been my husband’s student.
“Don’t worry, child,” she told me, “I’m gonna take good care of you.” And she did _ not just for my first baby, but for my second, three years later, and my third, three years after that.
By afternoon, the second day, when I was still in “hard labor,” my husband made the mistake of asking if I could “hurry it up a bit,” because he had another game to coach that night.  Later he would say he was joking. I was not amused. At one point, I heard him on the phone telling one of his players he was sorry, but he needed him to fill in as coach.

“I can hear you!” I said.

“Gotta go,” he whispered into the phone, “good luck!”
Things got fuzzy after that. Somebody told me to push, so I did, for a really long time, hours or days or years, I couldn’t say.
Next thing I knew, the coach was laughing and I was holding a little person that had big hands like a King Kong action figure, tiny but huge, and a lop-sided head like the rag doll that accidentally went through the wringer of my grandmother’s washer. And he was looking up at me as if he knew who I was, somebody he was really glad to meet. And I was falling, falling, fast and hard, forever and always in love.
What time was it? I don’t know. All I know is this: It was the right time _ not a moment too late or too soon _  just when he was needed by the world, by his dad and, most of all, by me.
But according to his birth certificate (that I finally found in a box after searching half the night) it was 5:57 p.m.

Print Me