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Feet First

Patricia Ljutic

    My mother recounted the story of her near-death so often when I was a child that, by age six, I had concluded that she’d never like me. In my mother’s tale of my birth, I lay inside her womb in a breech position being driven through the birth canal by back contractions so painful she felt she was being torn apart.
    When the pain briefly subsided, she thought her ordeal would end soon. Then, she felt my touch and asked the nurse, “Is that a little hand?”
    “It’s a foot.”
    At that moment the vise of pain gripped my mother once more; she lost control of her life and knew she was dying.
    After my birth, she brought me home, forced to live with the child who had almost killed her. She never forgave me for keeping her awake at night with colic and croupe, for her lack of preparation and for the incision the doctor made to extract me; my birth was synonymous with that sharp cut.
    In fact, she retold the details of her near-death delivery whenever we were alone: in the kitchen while she washed the dishes and I dried, in her bedroom while she combed my tangled hair and other times when she dumped the clean clothes on the couch and demonstrated how to fold T-shirts and towels. No one else knew. It was our secret.
    My mother made it clear that she’d much preferred my sister’s birth two years later, which she described as pushing out a bowling ball. This story contained none of the blood or pain-drenched drama. I understood, always as I did the day my mother brought my sister home and announced, “This is my easy baby” that my sister was her easy daughter. Maybe I was just too smart for my mother. She always called me “too smart.” She also said I was the “nice one,” but I never felt confident she thought that a good thing.
    I think it was natural that by eight and ten and twelve and sixteen I knew that I hadn’t planned to kill her. I was just a baby waiting to be born backwards, feet first. I think it was natural for me to hope she would love me.
    By the time my mother was fifty and I twenty-five, we lived five hundred miles away from each other. I don’t know what changed nor why my mother finally treated me as if she forgave me. She talked about me as if she were proud. I was a nurse; a mother; I drove eight hours each way to be with her for the holidays. She thanked me for helping make Thanksgiving dinners, sharing a New Year’s toasts with her, and hiding the Easter eggs.
    “You’re so smart,” she said. And this time, I felt she finally “saw” me, and I believed her.
    When cancer filled my mother’s belly and infiltrated her lungs, I brought her to the hospital, combed her tangled hair, held the emesis basin, and handed her tissues when she coughed up blood.
    “Give me courage,” she said. “Don’t tell me I’m dying. Give me hope.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    She and I had been there before: in a hospital room, when a different bright light shone, at another time when she’d lost control of her life.
    Year after year, my mother had told me my birth story, so by the time she had cancer I finally knew the secret. I knew what to do: How to hold her hand. How to say, “You’re fine, Mom. When you get better, I’ll take you home.”

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