Bringing Home the Duncan Phyfe: Chapter 15

Timing is Everything


Some may consider the opening of this chapter "for women only." I am fully aware that men in general have no business discussing this topic. We men concede that we have not "walked in those moccasins," we have no idea what those moccasins feel like, and if we mistakenly compare those moccasins to any male experience, we may get a good swift kick from a moccasined foot.

Speaking of good swift kicks, there is a uniquely "male" experience that can produce intense pain and cramping in the same region, but for some reason that painful experience is treated humorously whenever depicted in film and family video shows. It goes something like this: child swings bat, bat hits dad below the belt, dad doubles over, and about 1/4 of the woman watching think to themselves, "Serves him right. Have that happen every month on schedule and maybe we'll start feeling sorry for you."

Having admitted that the opening thoughts below are (experientially speaking) "for women only," I will nevertheless include them, as Mom did when she used to tell the story to us kids.

Let me see. Where was I? Oh, yes, I remember. Two weeks ago, Mom was reclining on the blanket at Pine Grove Park, and Dad had just begun swimming across the St. Clair River to Canada. Children were singing and playing on the swings across the way...and without thinking, Mom touched her stomach...

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

As Mom laid on the blanket, she remembered the day about six or seven years before when she sat alone screaming in the upstairs bathroom. Her grandmother heard her from the kitchen and bounded up the stairs shouting, "What's wrong, Beverley?" The door was not locked but stuck a little from some settling in the house. Grandma Collinge put her considerable weight against the door and it opened with such a bang that Mom fell silent mid-scream, holding out the crimson-stained tissue in her hand. Her grandmother stood in silence, huffing from her climb, then said between breaths, "Is that all you were screaming about?"

Mind you, my mother had been given no warning. She had never been told anything about this moment--not from her grandmother, not from her mother, not from a friend, not from a discreetly viewed film at school...nothing. All she knew was what she held in her hand, and she had every reason to believe that something was dreadfully wrong.

"What's wrong? Am I going to die?"

"Heavens no. Nothing's wrong." Then there came the same faint smile that broke when she spoke of loved-ones past. "You're a woman now."

"I've always been a woman."

"No, Dear. Before you were a girl. Now you're a woman."

"I'd rather be a girl," Mom cried. "When will this stop?"

"It'll stop in a day or so, but it will happen again every month."

"Every month? Does it happen to you and Momma?"

"Yes, Dear. It happens to all women. Every month from your age till about my age they tell me. The only time it doesn't happen is... oh, never mind. Your mother can tell you that herself. My lands, I nearly broke my neck running up these steps. Let me go get you some things you'll need. I'll be right back."

Funny thing. Mom vividly recalled that moment with her grandmother, but she doesn't remember either her or her mother ever explaining that the only time it wouldn't happen was when she was pregnant, a fact she picked up along the way and which was the secret cause of her smile there on the blanket. To know for sure, she had to see Dr. Licker [pronounced like the hard stuff], and she had an appointment for that afternoon. He told her if the lab was not too busy, she could know for sure by the end of the next week.

From the beginning of time, woman had to patiently read the secret signs and cycles of their inner universe to know if they were pregnant. Not until well into the 20th Century did the idea of needing "to know for sure" from a doctor become common practice. Today, at-home pregnancy tests about the size of a Q-Tip can let a woman know within minutes. When my first daughter was born in 1984, we used the Fact "lab kit" in this photo. That was considered new technology--and it was compared to what they did in the Fifties.
[Click photo to enlarge.]
Some younger readers may wonder why there is a rabbit in that old advertisement. It's because the most common pregnancy test after World War II was called the rabbit test. Millions of them were performed.

Here's how it worked: A sample of a urine specimen of the tested woman was injected into one of the ear veins of an isolated female lab rabbit. If the woman was pregnant, the injected hormones would cause the rabbit to ovulate (which does not happen in isolated captivity). To give the waiting woman the news within a week, the lab technicians would simply kill the rabbit, dissect her nether region, and determine whether or not ovulation had occurred. For several decades, the expression "The Rabbit Died" meant the test was positive, but in fact ovulation does not cause death in a rabbit any more than it does in the woman being tested. Whether positive or negative, the rabbit was in fact killed in the process of this test.

Though confirmation was a week away, Mom wanted to tell Dad the news. She was a little nervous about his reaction. "I thought we were going to wait a couple years," she could imagine him saying, and she heard herself saying right back, "Well, apparently you dropped your end of the deal. That 'timing' or rhythm method or whatever it's called must not be fool proof." It made her laugh to rehearse such an exchange, but it was merely a cover. Deep down she worried that if he felt anything less than her excitement, she would, in fact, be speechless and suddenly fear all that the months ahead would hold.

These thoughts so occupied her mind that she was suddenly parking the old Ford at their spot downstream with no recollection of having driven there. It startled her to think that she had navigated the streets with some other part of her brain. Had she stopped at intersections? Had she encountered other cars on the street? (I grew up with Mom driving us kids here and there, but by then she had learned to drive without worrying about such things.) She did not remember how she got there, yet there she was, parked between Beers and Bard Street facing the river.

.

Any minute now, she knew, Don would be climbing up over the bank through the trees that bend over the cold current.

Mom looked around the drab interior of the car. When Dad bought the ’39 Ford, it was ten years old and had already been dragged through one of the roughest decades in American history. Like nearly everything he bought, it needed some fixing up, but the price was right.

Mom turned on the radio and smiled. Until recently, it hadn’t worked, but Dad salvaged some tubes from a junk radio and got it going. So now, whenever they turned it on, it brought a smile of satisfaction just to hear it warm up. She turned the dial and heard frequency hums and squeaks between stations and stopped at the voice of Debbie Reynolds singing Aba Daba Honeymoon. The year before, Mom and Dad had first heard the song in a movie called Two Weeks in Love. Mom started singing along to the song, and nearly jumped out of her skin when Dad blurted through the window blurted, "What's my time?"

"Don, you scared me half to death!"

"What's my time. Check the watch."

Until that moment, Mom had forgotten that Dad specifically asked her to time his swim, and there he stood dripping wet, out of breath, waiting to hear if he had broken his personal record, and Mom had forgotten to keep an eye on his watch. In fact, at that moment, she didn't even know where the watch was.

"Here's your towel, Honey," she said, sliding out the car. As Dad began drying his short crew-cut hair, Mom looked in her purse but saw no watch. She leaned in the back seat and grabbed the blanket that she had wadded up and the watch fell out on the seat.

"Ah...What time was it when you left?" Mom asked innocently.

"You weren't timing me?" His moving hands paused to hold out the towel like a little awning over his disappointed eyes. "The one thing I asked you to do..." He dropped the towel over his face and resumed drying his hair. From under the towel he said, "Well I'm pretty sure I broke my record because I returned much further upstream, but the one thing I asked you to do..."

"Don, I'm pregnant!" she blurted out with a smile. It was not how she planned to say it, but she needed to change the subject quickly. "That's what I've been thinking about since you left--that's why I forgot to time you." Dad's head was still under the motionless towel. "Don?... Don, are you in there? We're going to have a baby."

He slowly raised the towel. His smile showed first. "Are you sure?"

"Well, I see Dr. Licker Monday, but I'm five weeks late."

"Five weeks late or one week past?"

"Five weeks late. It's been two months. I didn't know when to tell you."

"So when can Dr. Licker tell us for sure?"

"He said a week from now we'll know, but I'm pretty sure."

Dad just kept smiling, "When? How?" he said without thinking.

"I'm not sure about the when, but I do know the how." Mom laughed. "I think I'll be due around April."

"April? That's a good month. You were born in April."

Dad was still a little stunned. He quickly finished drying off and walked Mom to her side of the car.

"Here. You get in. I'm driving."

"Don't be silly. You've got to change your clothes. I can drive."

"No. I'll drive. I can change when we get there."

He closed the door behind her and walked around the front of the car smiling through the windshield. As he plopped behind the wheel, Mom slid to the center of the bench seat (a feature now extinct in cars). She hooked her left hand around Dad’s right arm. This was how they often rode when the moment or mood needed no further conversation. Dad was mumbling random things out loud, like "Holy Smoke!" or "Nine months before April. Must have been 4th of July maybe?" but such thoughts hardly qualified as conversation. Mom simply smiled at him in the rearview mirror.

.

As they drove back to Pine Grove, Mom turned the radio dial and stopped when she heard that year's number-one hit by Nat King Cole.

"I like this one," Dad said.

"Me, too." Mom sighed.

.

Dad could never resist singing along with Nat King Cole, and though Mom often joined in, that day with that song, she preferred to lean her head on his shoulder and listen..... [Hear Too Young on Youtube. The photomontage is not of my parents.]

.

They try to tell us we're too young

Too young to really be in love

They say that loves a word

A word weve only heard

But cant begin to know the meaning of,

And yet were not too young to know

This love will last though years may go,

And then some day they may recall

We were not too young at all.