What was it like twenty seven years later to give birth for the first time when your earliest recollection of childbirth was your mother dying along with your sister? Was she scared during the entire pregnancy, even though she wanted a baby? Nine months of fear and sadness – anxiety that only women could possibly know who have experienced this kind of trauma.  

And during this era right after World War II, tragedy and trauma went unrecognized as events that needed therapy. There was no talking or sharing. How alone did she feel as memories surfaced? I cannot imagine her sharing her thoughts and feelings with my Daddy during this time. Maybe? but, I seriously don’t think so. Her own grandfather, who was the family patriarch, had passed only two months before she became pregnant.  He served as ‘parent’ to his grandchildren who had lost both mother and father before my mother turned twelve; she was the oldest of three. 

Death past and present within the year of her pregnancy?  What was transmitted in utero? Did my low-birth weight have anything to do with the stress that must have been present for the nine months I was in her belly? 

I knew that I was breech and low birth weight; and, in pondering this time and events, I can only wonder what I experienced and felt from her trauma with her mother’s death that was embedded deep within. What did she pass on to me along with life? I arrived within two years after their relocation to Tennessee upon my father’s discharge from the Army Air Corps during World War II. Not only death past and present with family, but recovering from several years of ‘war stress’.