Baby boom: Mothers should also be recognized for their pain and suffering | Opinion

On this Mother’s Day, I can say that the days of my mother have not always been like a Hallmark card.

Particularly the days her three children were born.

Daddy wasn’t with her when her first son quit kicking “like a football scrimmage” in her womb and joined a snowy world on Dec. 10, 1950.

Mama was 22. For six years she would be pregnant or nursing, and washing cloth diapers every day but Sunday.

But on this day, kind of scared, away in Lexington, Virginia, staying with her in-laws until the baby came, she got to the small hospital that was in Stonewall Jackson’s home and heard a nurse say, “Oh, no. Not another one.”

Uncle Jamie took her to the hospital. Apparently, no one recognized that the same man had left earlier that day with a different woman, carrying out with his wife their own new baby, Mary Ellen.

Daddy was still in seminary, so suffice it to say there were no silver spoons clinking around in that delivery room.

Mama said they stitched her up wrong, and she felt she’d be in pain for the rest of her life.

It was, as they say, hotter than the hinges of hell the day Mama gave birth a second time.

Daddy was serving his first church, Bethany Associate Reformed Presbyterian in York County, South Carolina. It was his job on July 25, 1952 to call the doctor when labor pains came.

But teenagers refused to immediately get off the party line, a sign of things to come.

When they got to the Divine Savior Hospital in York, the doctor asked for a few more minutes in his car to listen to the Democratic National Convention as Adlai Stevenson was nominated on the dramatic third ballot.

Daddy’s job was then to record the time between contractions, and Mama kept saying, “There IS no time between contractions, George!”

He finally went out into the hall to get some help. He found an orderly. They tried to stuff Mama into a wheelchair, but the two of them ended up pushing her to the delivery room in her hospital bed. She still hadn’t had so much as an aspirin for pain.

The doctor was by now tending to kids who had been hit by a car as they walked home from a swimming hole.

Lois Ann came into the world kicking and flailing, lifting a burden from Mama, then 23. This baby had been still for nine months, and that worried her.

A reality show broke out during Mama’s eight-day stay at the hospital founded and operated by the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy.

Mama can laugh about some of it today, enjoying the turned down pages of a life now limited to a bedroom. At 94, she spends all her time in an electric hospital bed.

A woman came to Divine Savior from a plane crash. A room was not ready for her, so she sat in a chair in Mama’s room. Her sharp hairstyle was not a hairstyle at all. It had been singed that way in the crash the killed her husband.

Another woman came in with a child who had swallowed kerosene. Mama can still hear the mother’s screams that didn’t stop, even after her child was out of danger.

Later, a patient tried to run away. He went dashing across the yard in his hospital gown, Sisters of Charity chasing him in their long black habits. A passing motorist spotted the action and nabbed him.

“I had to go home to get some rest,” Mama said.

Mama has kept that hospital bill. It totaled $28.85.

And they did get her stitched up properly.

She was 25 when I was born April 26, 1954, across the state line in Gastonia, North Carolina.

Dr. W.K. McGill, who delivered me, had been my grandfather’s roommate at Erskine College. And in time his grandson would end up being my roommate at Erskine.

The hospital bill was $59.17.

Twenty-eight years later to the day, our first one was born at Rex Hospital in Raleigh. My job was to intone soothing scenes for my wife as she begged for a second epidural.

I finally asked, “Sweetie, do you want to come to before or after this child enters kindergarten?”

It’s good that we join Hallmark in honoring mothers for all their nurturing and grace.

But shouldn’t we also recognize their pain and suffering?

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.