Post #177 – Women’s Memoirs, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
All Things Labor — Memoir Contest – Honorable Mention Story, Labor Day Pains Category
Today Women’s Memoirs is proud to publish Linda Mussilo’s Honorable Mention in our September 2011 Memoir Writing Contest, Labor Day Pains Category.
Linda, I know our readers will enjoy your award-winning story as it mingles your personal memories with a public memory we all hold.
We invite you to leave Linda a note in the Comments section below her story.
Want to enter one of our contests? At the bottom of Linda’s story, you will find details on our new contest. We hope you’ll enter.
Ten Years Old
By Linda Mussilo
I’m not the only one who is stunned.
“He’s ten already?”
My friends shake their heads. How can it be? Has that much time really passed?
September 11, 2001
“Put on the TV.”
That’s what my friend had said when she called. Her voice had told me not to ask, only to obey. As I did, my heart fell into my stomach.
Under normal circumstances, nothing could have wrenched me from that news. But my situation was anything but normal. The spots of blood were small, but it was blood and that couldn’t be good.
I phoned my husband at work and told him both pieces of news simultaneously: we were going to the hospital and the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane.
Everything jumbled – a distorted jigsaw with important pieces missing. I had to go. I had to pack. I had to call my parents. I had to check my panties again. I had to catch my breath. For a moment, I had to – we had to — look at the TV…
“Wait – where’s the other tower?! Where did it go?”
“I don’t know! We have to go! Oh my God. Do you think…?”
Every part of my body clenched, especially my brain. Not today, not today, not today.
My doctor wasted no time deciding. My blood pressure was high and it had to be today. He was due in two days anyway. She gave me no choice when I protested. I would be induced on September 11, 2001.
“Today? Today? It’s not a good day…”
“Breathe,” said my husband, trying valiantly to use what we’d learned in Lamaze; his voice was uncharacteristically soothing and encouraging, like a preschool teacher’s. I could only wince and eventually yell – “Breathe? Who are they kidding!” One of the nurses stroked my arm and whispered, “Shhh, try not to yell at him – the men don’t understand.”
“I want an epidural,” I said more than once and with growing insistence.
“It’s too soon,” the nurse said. In the background, the television news burbled. The nursing staff had wanted it on—who could blame them– and I had said it was okay. Everyone tried to pretend they weren’t watching and that things were just normal – a normal day, a normal birth.
The epidural was heavenly – a relaxation came that I could hardly believe. It meant that I could watch the TV – even comment on it. The pictures floated in front of me: smoke and screams, running, gasping, police, and somber pronouncements, tears and tears choked back. But I couldn’t “feel it”. Did the epidural do that too?
As we closed in on midnight, I couldn’t push anymore; I couldn’t feel anymore. The doctor waited, and then a vacuum “suck” gave me the extra help I needed. My son whooshed out of me, looking every bit like the boy I’d imagined. Dark hair already threatening to be thick and curly, like that of both his parents, covered his head. The pint-sized version of his mother’s Italian nose had leapt from my face to his as had the long lady-like lashes of his dad. He had, however, the feet of someone else—the abominable snowman maybe? They were so big the doctor couldn’t help herself and gasped: “Look at those feet!” We all managed to laugh.
“He was born on the 12th? Not September 11th?”
My parents and I spent five minutes on the phone talking about my new son. We spent the rest of the time talking about the other events of the day. My brother was there too; his downtown Manhattan apartment was now like a war zone. No power, no water, rubble and smoke everywhere.
For a long time I didn’t want to tell my son. But now he knows that many people wept and thanked us when we announced his birth. “Thank God you’ve given us good news,” they said. They called it a true blessing at a dark time. Or they said it was a reminder that life goes on, that there is joy in the world. One person said there was something deeply spiritual about his being born at that time.
My depression came when I could finally watch again and again with everyone else what I’d only absorbed in bits when it happened. I watched with full horror, transfixed, often in tears. The malaise lingered for a few months, not helped by my new baby’s feeding problems and difficulties sleeping, both making it impossible to rest myself. And for longer than a few months I couldn’t talk about his birth. Friends tried not to mention “the day” he was born, but one friend was braver. As a gift, she gave my son a picture book called “The Day You Were Born” and inscribed it “Any day a child is born is a beautiful day.”
My son turns 10 this September. Those two digits scare the heck out of me. But not more than the mirror does. Puberty has not just knocked; it has kicked down his door. When he hugs me, I am reminded that his head ends up somewhere in my bosoms. On his left upper lip, there is a moustache shadow — just on that side. The lopsidedness is both endearing and bittersweet. Once in a while he asks me to help him trim it; other times, he points it out proudly. “I have a moustache already! Imagine how hairy I’ll be! Just like dad.”
I smile, knowing that it is probably more like mom, but that’s a secret between me and my electrologist. Yet, I still see my innocent boy in that mirror, too — the boy who is still learning to control his emotions, the one who still giggles at such silly things like the word “fart”, and who still doesn’t mind his mom’s hugs– so much.
Sometimes I feel like I blinked once and those 10 years were gone.
