It was the late shift, at the hospital where my mother was working. Ideal, if you want to get out of doing work, but the most boring shift of the day, with all the patients sleeping, all the visitors gone for the day. The nurses sat around with little to do. They began to draw labs from each other, honing their skills, they may have convinced themselves, but merely fighting boredom is closer to the truth. Each lab came back negative for this and that, as expected.
One of the nurses handed my mother the results to her test. They all looked at each other in disbelief. The labs were for fun only; just to keep their hands busy and their minds entertained with impossible ideas. This is why my mother could not believe that she was pregnant.
“You’re joking,” she said over and over. Having only been married for a year, she hadn’t planned for anything like this, until things had settled down and there was enough time, not to mention money, to bring another life into the mix. “You’re joking.”
My mother signed out of the hospital, terrified and trembling as she walked across the parking lot to her car. She unlocked the car, opened the door, and sat staring at the steering wheel. It took a few minutes to get her head, to begin to comprehend the immenseness of what had just taken place, before she turned on the ignition. As soon as she turned the key, the radio clicked on and “Tupelo Honey,” by Van Morrison, began to play. “She’s as sweet as tupelo honey,” he sang to her, reassuringly. She says that this was the moment that my name was spoken to her, “by an angel,” she tells me
When my mother would put me to sleep at night, or when I would crawl into her lap crying, she would sing the lyrics to me. Even now, as I live away from her in my own world, living my own life, she reminds me every now and then:
“You can take all the tea in China
Put it in a brown bag for me
Sail right around all the seven oceans
Drop it straight into the deep blue sea
She’s as sweet as tupelo honey
She’s an angel of the first degree
She’s as sweet, she’s as sweet as tupelo honey
Just like honey, baby, from the bee”
mostly true. it was the emergency room and there were no patients. it was the night that the Persian gulf war started, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and we were watching the news and I was thinking that your daddy would be heading off to the war as he was an active duty soldier. in addition I had been accepted to graduate school. i had no idea i was pregnant. you know what else? this is a secret from your daddy and I never told anyone this before, but before I left the ER, I called your nanny in VA and woke her up and told her that I was pregnant. (its a secret from daddy because I called her before I told him-I wanted to tell him in person, but I wanted to tell someone AT THAT MOMENT, and moms are good for that. love, mommy
ReplyDeletehmmmm those could have made good details in this narrative, if I had known that before, although they also may have taken away from the point of it. BUT i like knowing :)
ReplyDeletealso, mommy dear, you can't tell me your secrets on my blog unless you want my readers to see it haha but, obviously, i published this post because i figured you assumed that.... so tell me if you want me to take it down.
thanks for being my number one fan! haha xoxo
Wonderful story, Mary. I love "Tupelo Honey." My daughter's name came from my sister's boyfriend at the time hearing the Allman Bros. song "Melissa" on the radio and saying it was a pretty name. I was about 6 months pregnant, at home visiting my parents, and I thought, "That's her name. Melissa." And it was.
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