Butt…

Sometimes Mondays can be so bad that you actually know they’re bad before 6:00 AM. This was just such a Monday. The alarm went off around 5:30 AM and the snooze button was hit almost instantly. When it went off about seven minutes later, my husband and I actually started to move and stretch. Like any other Monday we exchanged early morning pleasantries and asked how the other slept.

Then things went terribly awry. Teasingly, I told my husband he had stolen the covers.
“I’ve got the same amount of covers I always have.” He replied.
“Then why do I feel a breeze on my butt?” I giggled back.
“Because you’ve got a big butt.”
“What??”
“Because your butt is big… Where are you going? What’s wrong?”
“I need to get dressed and cover up my big, fat, ugly butt!”
“You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say that all of you is bigger because you’re six and a half months pregnant, and I like the changes. Of course your butt is big.” He finished in a very lame attempt to recover from his desperate error in judgment and tact.

I’d heard enough. I was ready to crawl under my rock and hide for a while, but I was pretty sure my big, fat butt was not going to fit. I just needed to escape. I grabbed my clothes and ran for the bathroom, barely keeping the tears back.

After taking me 2 years to loose the excess weight I had gained while pregnant with my son, I had sworn never to be so overweight again. I had even gone the other way and gotten down to 98 pounds before settling on a healthy 110 – 115 for my athletic 5”0” frame. For the past 6 years of my life I had lived on a very strict diet to counter my lack of metabolism. The one target of my total, undying hatred? My butt!

My butt is not horrible when covered in nice jeans or shorts. While wearing a bathing suit, I have always kept a short sarong wrapped around my hips to disguise the cellulite. This cellulite was passed down from generation to generation, from my grandmother to my mother to me, just like the Steinway & Son’s grand piano that’s been in our family for over a hundred years. Though the piano is worth quite a bit today, the cellulite is not. No matter how much weight I’ve lost in the past and no matter how many miles I have gone on my in-line-skates, that cellulite has followed me like a bad acquaintance who’s always saying, “I’ve got your back!”

That morning I made it to the bathroom before bursting into a volley of tears. It wasn’t just my day that was ruined. My month was ruined, my year was ruined. Everything was ruined until I could get rid of my big, fat butt!

The worst part of all was the knowledge that it would never go away unless I somehow saved the money to have it surgically removed. I knew after my pregnancy, I might go down to about 105 pounds with hard work and dieting, but that huge butt would still be back there. Even if it got back down to a size 2 again, it would still have that ugly, bumpy quality to it. With my luck I’d finally have liposuction one day, only to have it sag like ancient, deflated breasts. Ancient, LUMPY, deflated breasts. Yuck!

Are we women too sensitive about what people say and think about our bodies? HELL YES, we are! It was great when Sir Mixalot came out with the infamous rap, Baby Got Back. It gave some of us hope that there were men out there who like women with a bit of junk in the trunk. The question still stands; do they mind the hail damage on the trunk lid?

Twenty-five-thousand apologies followed that morning’s unfortunate event, but none could ever undo the damage to my self esteem. Sometimes I’m known to carry on a running dialog with myself inside my head. That morning it consisted of, “Jake’s ready. Ok, now get him in the car. Buckle up his car seat. I hope nobody in the neighborhood sees my fat butt hanging out of the car. They might think a hippo has escaped from the zoo and gotten its head stuck in my car. Ok, now sit your fat butt in the seat. Am I doing damage to the springs? Will this lower the resale value of my car? Drop him off at school, and off I go to my work. Park the car. Open the door and squeeze giant, fat butt out the door.

My poor, bemused husband even went so far as to back out of going to a basketball game with some of his buddies that night so he could come home and console me and my fat butt. I truly wished he hadn’t as I had already made plans to go get a haircut (to draw more attention to my face and away from my giant a$$) and to pout. I’m sure he would have enjoyed watching those stick-thin, twenty-year-old, non-pregnant cheerleaders shaking their tiny, little bootys around all evening instead of coming home to kiss my big, fat one. Pity.

As for me, at the beauty salon I had an opportunity to berate myself further while looking at all the tight-butted models in Cosmo and Glamour and afterward I went home to watch TV shows starring a multitude of anorexic actresses. I was just pampering myself! (Speaking of pampers, I wondered if they made adult diapers this big?).

Was I obsessed? Yes. Would I diet even though I was pregnant? Let’s put it this way. If I hadn’t gained another pound in the last 13 weeks of that pregnancy, I would still have gained more than enough. My baby would have been just fine, feeding off the stores of my great, big, fat, butt! I figured she would probably be a little porker, in fact. No, I didn’t diet. I just did not eat as much. I ate healthy food. And vitamin pills. And I swore I would never look in the mirror again. When they made me step on a scale at the doctor’s office, I turned around so I couldn’t see it (then I promptly weighed myself as soon as I got home because curiosity was killing me). And above all, I always wore clothes that covered up my big, fat, huge, nasty, lumpy, gross butt!

Ever have one of those days?

Nesting

Why is it that somewhere in the 8^th month of pregnancy, human mothers are over-taken by a sudden and irresistible urge to clean everything in their paths? This “nesting” is not to be confused with spring cleaning. The activities encompassed by “nesting” may include such things as sanitizing the insides of cabinets, using a toothbrush to clean the grout behind the toilet, vacuuming or otherwise airing the box-springs and mattresses on all the beds and using a vacuum attachment to suck the dirt from behind the baseboards, to mention a few. Creative women will find many other cleaning activities to keep themselves busy over this nesting period that would confound the most obsessive-compulsive cleaner.

I can remember squeezing (wedging) myself between the shower and toilet to remove the scum that had built up in the crevasse between the back of the toilet tank and the wall. If my unborn child thought the accommodations were tight already, he had another thing coming until that scum was gone! I have often wondered if this cleaning spree created or otherwise affected his ability at age eight to put his ankles behind his head – a talent he loves to show off at the most unusual of times. Thank goodness I have recently been able to curb his habit of inquiring of people at the grocery store, “you wanna see me lick my nipple?”

The nesting phase can also be blamed for some of the unusual creations that appeared about my house. Though generally I can not be classified as the “domestic” type, I was guilty of sewing a quilt for my first baby. Well, it’s supposed to be a quilt. I’ve never been one for tedious measurements, or sewing straight lines. I still have the thing, too. I take it out whenever I need a good laugh.

It was at that same time that I also scrubbed the horses’ barn from top to bottom. Perhaps this was some odd form of “Mary Complex” for those of us who are concerned we might have to lay our child in a manger around tax time. Though the horses were amicable to the changes, I doubt they noticed the lack of cob webs or dust and they efficiently had the barn back to its original working condition within days.

Of course by then I had moved on to my truck. I vacuumed under the seats and cleaned the jack and lug wrench, too. I thought about having the bed-liner removed so I could wash underneath it, but gave that idea up when I realized I’d have to store the liner in the dirty basement. And that got me started on the basement! I swept the cinderblock walls and cement floor before hosing the whole thing down with bleach and scrubbing the underside of the steps.

Having bred dogs for a number of years, I noticed this behavior is not limited to the human species. Nesting does, however, take on a slightly different form for dogs. My Boston Terrier, Maggie, used to find dirty socks and old newspaper to line her whelping box. In contrast, I was washing the new crib sheets on a bi-weekly basis starting two months prior to my son’s birth. Though Maggie would sit and stay, I never was successful in teaching her to vacuum or dust during her nesting phase. On the other hand, like me, she was very good at cleaning her dish throughout her pregnancy.

Perhaps nesting with my second child will be different. As I sit here and write, I’m 19 weeks pregnant and already thinking about all the things that need to be done before the baby is born. Though we’ve already registered for the baby necessities, I still have to vacuum the back yard, steam-clean the trampoline, disinfect the cats, wash all the dog's clothes and purify one Texas lake. At least this house doesn’t have a basement!

Girda the Demonic Viking Lactation Coach

The first thing you need to understand before I dive into the post-birth quagmire with Girda, is that the Lord saw fit to bless my baby sister with MY breasts. It’s that whole sibling rivalry thing revisited, “Mom, she took my belt!” “Mom, she’s making faces at me!” Mom, she has boobies and won’t give me any!” Yes, my sister is a 36 EE, and I… I am a 32 A minus. In fact, to add insult to injury, my nipples don’t even stick out! What sort of sick sense of humor does it take to give a flat-chested woman “innies?”

Prior to knowing that I was doomed with a life-sentence of flat-chestedness, I was just as thrilled as any other 11-year-old to go out with my mother and purchase my first “Training Bra.” This contraption of straps and two tiny triangles of lacy fabric would become cell keeper to my rib cage for the next 5 years. In those 5 years I learned how to french-kiss, how to dance, and how to wiggle my training bra back in to place without being noticed. Finally at age 16, I came to the realization that my breasts had been in training for quite some time, and apparently they hadn’t learned a damned thing! The “Training Bra” was discarded along with other items of childhood fantasy like my tiara and the fake ruby slippers I had kept hidden in my closet for years. I was never to be a princess, and I was never to model for Victoria’s Secret. I quit wearing a bra altogether, and quite enjoyed this freedom through college and my early 20’s.

I find it funny that though flat as a board, I must still suffer through the embarrassment of the yearly breast exam performed by my gynecologist. Like I wouldn’t notice some lump that had attached itself to my ribs? On one occasion the doctor was inspecting me with a look of concentration on his face and stated, “I seem to have found a small lump on your left side.”
My simple reply was “Thank-goodness! Can you find my right one too?”

I was ecstatic when I finally became pregnant! First, I was going to have a baby! Second, I was suddenly an “A” cup! A real “A” cup! Like, I could actually wear a grown-up bra without the worry of finding it nestled up under my arm pits at the end of the day! I’d been waiting 25 years for this.

Of course there was also the down-side. Suddenly as I trotted down the stairs, there were these two lumps on my chest that seemed to have developed a life of their own. They were bouncing! And they were SORE! When I lay on my side at night, they were there… pinching themselves between my arm and body. It took some getting used to (though my husband adjusted pretty quickly). Unfortunately my poor little nipples seemed to be confused and upset by the changes. They hid deeper inside, only coming out in the extreme cold, but rushing back to their hiding places as soon as the goose-pimples had subsided. It got so bad that around the 7^th month of pregnancy, they even started to cry at night!

About this time, I started to read up on breast-feeding. It was made clear through the television and the pamphlets at the doctor’s office that only mothers possessed by Satan himself did not breast-feed their babies! From the looks of it, some states might even have pressed charges in if a mother was found purchasing formula for a minor! But what I read concerning breast-feeding started to frighten me…
“Hold the baby in the crook of your arm. Gently touch his lower lip with your finger until he starts to ‘root’ or look for your nipple. Bring your breast to your baby’s face and place your nipple in his mouth.”
Are we talking about a breast or a garden hose? “Bring your breast to your baby’s face…?” The only thing I was going to be bringing anywhere was my baby to the thing that looked like a halved orange stuck to my chest because I was pretty sure it wasn’t going anywhere! Hmmmm… was this going to be a problem?

So finally my baby was lying in my arms.
“The lactation coach will be here in about 5 minutes.” The day-nurse warned me. Well, looking back I say “warned.” I suppose at the time she “told” me that the nurse would be in.

And in came Girda!

The best way to visualize Girda is that large, Viking woman in the opera, but without the horns (or, at least, you couldn’t actually see them). Vit a very tick German accent she sait, “Tak ovv your tup, pleez.”
“Hi, my name is Leigh and this is my son Jacob.”
“Tak ovv your tup, pleez.”
“What’s your name?”
“Girrrrdahhh. Tak ovv your tup, pleez.”
As I began to wonder if the next sentence would be ‘Vee haff vays ov makink you tak ovv your tup!’ I quickly began opening my gown. Before I was even fully exposed, a large mutton-like hand had shot out and adhered itself to my tiny, sore, orange-half boobie.
“Hmmmm… dis iz nut verrrry goot. Do you haff nipplez?”
“Uh, yeah… they’re just innnn-aaaaaahhhhhh! Um, I guess you found them, huh?”
“Uummmm-hmmmm.”
“Am I going to have trouble because I’m small?”
She stood back with her arms crossed over her ample chest while she scrutinized the situation. “In uull my twenty-fife yerrs ov teaching dis, noboooty walk out ov hospital not brest feetink baby!
(Did the rest of them get rolled out in body-casts? This was not a good start!)
Girda broke my panic-stricken silence with “Let me haff your niplez again.”
Like I had a choice.
“Deez are not too goot for feedink baby.”
She held Jacob against me and appeared to be attempting to stuff my entire breast into his mouth. After torturing us both to her satisfaction for the next 30 minutes, she announced, “Teachink baby to nurzz frum you like teachink him to nurse frum wall. He can nut latch on to sometink he can nut finte. Zo now I tell ladees, in uull my twenty-fife yerrs ov teaching dis, der voss only one who did nut.”
And with that, she left.

While I was sitting there in shock, my husband came in with a bottle of formula.
“What, things didn’t go so well? I was just in the sitting room with Sgt. Neilson’s wife and she said she never even needed the coach.” he said innocently.
As soon as I found my voice, I replied “If you think it’s so damn easy, why don’t you give it a try?”

In the years since that time, I have discovered that babies do fine on formula, you won’t be arrested for not breast-feeding, and a little thing called the Miracle Bra. I have a wonderful, healthy son, a nice figure in clothes, and plenty of extra room in my bra to carry my wallet, keys and makeup. I can proudly state to anyone who asks,

“Yes! These are 100% natural… cotton.”

The Story of Jacob’s Birth Day

Knowing that Jake was breech, we decided on a planned C-section at 38 weeks gestation. I was given the choice of any day from March 13th – 17th. Well, that’s a no-brainer, huh? I’ll be the mom that never forgets her son's birthday and take St. Patrick’s Day, thank-you! Though I was nervous the night before, I had no trouble sleeping anywhere, any time in my third trimester. We woke up the next morning and went in to Irwin Army Hospital, Ft. Riley, KS at 6:00 AM.

I got into the little gown with my butt hanging out and stuck out my arm to have the IV put in. Because they can never get a vein in my hand, they stuck me 5 or 6 times in the arm before getting a good one. Because I’m legally blind, we had made special arrangements for me to wear my coke-bottle lens glasses throughout the procedure so I could see my baby and test to see if the OR lights were capable of starting a fire through the two magnifying glasses on my face.

Around 7:30 AM, my butterflies and I were wheeled into the OR for the spinal. I had taken childbirth classes at a local hospital, and the breathing techniques (controlled hyperventilation/panic) came in quite handy! I’m terrified of needles, so I was careful not to look at the one they were about to stick in my spine. (If I’d seen it, they might not have needed any anesthetic as I would have passed out.) I sat on the gurney and leaned forward against a nurse as the anesthesiologist gave me a shot of Novocain and then inserted the needle and tube for the spinal. Slow inhale 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… 7… 8… exhale… … 3… 4… (fight panic attack) 5… 6… (don’t wiggle) 7… (Yeah, right!) 8…

I warned the staff prior to the procedure that I have a history of resistance to anesthetics of every kind. I don’t think they believed me. I was lying on my back and I could feel my legs going numb. What a strange, tingly feeling! I was pretty well numbed (I thought) and couldn’t move my legs so they strapped me down spread eagle, stripe-ass naked on a wide gurney. They put a screen up in front of my face and my husband stood to my left. The surgeon prepared to make the first incision and…
“Um… I can feel your hand on me – is that normal?” I asked nervously.
The doctor responded, “You may feel some pressure or believe you’re feeling something, but our minds play tricks on us when we’ve been anesthetized.”
“Ok” I said, “but it feels like your fingers are just below my belly button, and your thumb is near my pubic hair-line.”
Silence…
“And now you’re making little circles with your finger…” I told him.
“Can we give her more?” The doctor asked the anesthesiologist.
The anesthesiologist replied, “It’s a Spinal, not an Epidural. Maybe it just needs another minute.”
“And how about now?” The doctor asked me a minute later.
“Feels like the palm of …” I started.
“We’re going to have to knock her out…”
“…Jesus… um, yeah… the palm of Jesus… has just taken all the feeling away” I gasped.
“Are you sure…” the doctor asked in a dubious voice.
“Can’t feel a thing!” I grinned innocently. Gulp!
Luckily the spinal worked well enough to cut out the sharp pain, though I could still feel every move they made. I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to meet my baby for the first time in the next few minutes! I think the nurse to my right who was monitoring my pulse was on to me, but simply whispered “Just let me know if it gets too bad.”
I was so excited that it wasn’t bad at all. I just used the breathing techniques I had learned, and I was fine.

After a few minutes, the doctor yelled, “We’ve got a science experiment in here! Get the camera and invite the gang to look at this one!”
“What’s…?”
“Don’t worry about it.” The doctor snapped in my direction.
(Yeah, right! The gang? Here I am strapped down like a beached whale, Nekid, with most of my innards lying on the outside of my body and you want to bring the Gang in? And what science experiment…?)
The doctor continued, “Now I’m going to make the incision… and break your water… towels! We’ve got a turtle-neck! Umbilical is wrapped three times around the neck!”
(Um, yeah – Panic Attack!)
And then I heard the most beautiful sound of my son crying and gasping for air. My euphoria was broken short by the doctor’s shout of “We’ve got a PREEMIE here! Get the cart STAT!”
“What…” (Am I on an emotional roller-coaster or something? I think I just wet myself… oh yeah, my catheterized bladder is in a spoon-clamp-thingy and sitting on my right hip.)
Suddenly the room was full of people rushing around with strange-looking equipment and yelling stuff to each other. Of course I was trying at this point to sit up to see where my baby was and find out what was going on. The OR team had to hold me down to prevent the rest of my innards from rolling out onto the table.
The pediatrician called out, “First APGAR is a 9... Second APGAR is a 10! It’s just a runt.”
“A runt???” (Did I have a baby or puppies?)
The nurse by my side whispered, “You just have a very little baby. We’re going to run some tests, but he seems to be fine. That pediatrician NEVER gives 10’s! That’s a really good sign.”
Finally, my 4lb 12oz squalling baby was brought over and placed on my chest. His crying stopped completely, and his little brown eyes opened up and looked directly into mine! I started crying, whispered “hi” to him and told him how much I loved him. My right hand had been released and I was able to hold him for just a minute.

He was taken from me to let his daddy hold him, and then whisked him off for tests. The doctor had started working to put me back together, and at this point I looked at the nurse and said, “Um, excuse me, but could you tell the doctor that that clamp on the left side is pinching a bit, and his hands are kind of cold?”

That was the last thing I remember before waking up about 2 hours later in recovery. Evidently they gave me enough of something to knock out a small elephant. I rather looked and felt like a small elephant too, but I slept well knowing my tiny little baby was just fine.

I later found out that the “science experiment” within me was a uterine anomaly where only half my uterus had developed. Cute, huh? The deformity is called a Unicornuate Uterus and it may explain in part my trouble conceiving that time and in the years to come. God forbid I could just be normal for once. Honestly, I knew even before they told me that my beautiful son was nothing less than the most wonderful miracle in my world.

Preterm Farm Labor

The January day was gloomy, yet unseasonably warm for Kansas. Our next door neighbor (who lived about three miles to our East) had promised my husband and me that he would open our eyes to the wonderful world of farm auctions that day. By 6:00 in the morning the three of us were settled on the bench seat of my pick-up truck and on our way to the farm auction in a town about an hour away. We found the seating a bit snug, not because any of us were over-weight, but because I was 31 weeks pregnant at the time.

By the time we got there, the rain had stopped and a light mist had settled over the rolling landscape. Climbing out of the truck, we found ourselves in a veritable farming wonderland. As we walked about, large tractors, stock trailers, water troughs and feeders loomed out of the mist. We could hear the auctioneer, on a mobile microphone set-up that trailed him from object to object, rattling off semi-recognizable numbers to an excited crowd. Had one chanced to see an aerial view of the process, I’m sure it would have closely resembled a swarm of locusts, consuming large farm equipment as it wound a path over the mist covered field.

We were there to find and purchase a hog feeder. That’s right. My city-raised Jewish husband who had a full-time job with the US Army thought raising hogs would be a great idea for supplemental income. Like a kid with a puppy, I had known prior to the venture who would end up taking care of the smelly, rooting beasts. I knew who would end up chasing escapees, which I had already had the pleasure of doing twice the month before. I’m sure it would have paid for my son’s college education if we had thought to capture “Pregnant Woman Chasing The Three Little Pigs” on a video camera and sent it to America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Though I was one of the lucky few who did not experience morning-sickness during my first pregnancy, being greeted by those creatures first thing each morning simulated what I’m sure other not so lucky pregnant women feel. Pig-stench tends to hit right in the stomach like a good left hook. The hope was that the hog feeder would reduce my number of necessary visits to the pig pen.

By 12:30 that afternoon our hog-feeder mission had been accomplished, but my husband was fully caught up in the excitement of the auction and wanted to stay a little longer. I started to feel a little funny and decided to go sit down in the café area that had been set up in an old shed on the property. I purchased some hot chocolate and sat down. Just sitting felt good as I had developed a bit of a back ache from standing for so long.

After a wile I began to notice what I thought were Braxton-Hicks contractions. After the third one, I decided to peek at my watch. Hmmm – odd. They were coming every ten minutes. I tried relaxing a bit more, and purchased some bottled water to sip on. Hmmm – every seven minutes. When the contractions began growing a bit stronger and coming every six minutes with no sign of stopping, I figured perhaps I should let my husband know.

I wandered out into the throng and finally located my husband after two more contractions. He was gazing lovingly at a large, green and yellow John Deere with a hay-bailing attachment.
I tugged his sleeve, saying, “Um, honey?”
Not breaking his gaze, he responded, “Six cycle 466 CID engine with 181 PTO horsepower…”
“David, I think we should think about leaving pretty soon.”
“Three hydraulic valves, air-conditioned and heated cab, eight forward and four reverse shift transmission…”
“David!”
“Two Snyder 250 gallon side tanks…”
Thwhack! “David!”
“Hey! What do you want?”
“We need to leave!”
“What’s your problem?”
“I’m having contractions.”
At this our neighbor Brian, who happened to be a father of three, perked his ears up and asked, “How far apart?”
“I don’t know. I guess about 5 or six minutes.”
Taking matters, and my annoyed husband, into his own hands, Brian marched us over to the truck.
“You wanna see something that runs better than a Deere?” Brian asked David. “I suggest we run this here Dodge truck towards a hospital, and fast!”
“But the hog feeder…”
“Let me show you something. This here move is called throw and go. You get that end.”
The two men tossed the large hog feeder into the back of the truck, laid it on its’ side and quickly took their places on either side of me on the bench seat. With that, we were on our way… or so we thought.

After keeping the truck at a reasonable rate of speed over the two-mile gravel road up to the black-top, David hit the gas as the tires hit the black-top.
“THUNK! Creek, creek, creek”
The bottom-heavy hog feeder suddenly stood itself up in the bed of the truck and was rocking wildly like one of those weighted blow-up punching toys after a good slug from a toddler.
We pulled over to the side of the road, and in a variation of a Chinese-fire-drill, the men sped out and laid the thing back over and jumped back into the truck.
“How far apart are they?” Brian gasped as soon as he’d caught his breath.
Puff, puff, “Four minutes.” I responded, recovering from another vice-like contraction. “But no pain – it just feels like a gorilla is giving me a bear hug from behind, right around my belly.”
David sped the truck back onto the road.
“THUNK!! Creek, creek, creek, creek.”
“Damn it!”
Again the truck was pulled onto the side of the road and the hog feeder put back in place.
“We shoulda got some rope.” One grumbled.
“Well, if SHE coulda just waited…” The other grumbled back.
“Just keep’er slow.”
“How’m I supposed to do that?”
“The truck, stupid.”
“Who’re you calling stupid?”
“Could we just get towards the house, please?” I interrupted. “They’re getting stronger.”
We found by trial and error that the magic speed was 45 miles per hour. What was a one-hour trip at 70 miles per hour in the morning turned into a two hour journey homeward.

It crossed our minds to stop at a local hospital on the way, but unfortunately there weren’t any. We even considered a veterinary hospital alongside the road, but it appeared to be closed. (I was not overly upset as I was currently entertaining images of some manure-covered man with a plastic glove up to his shoulder approaching me to “Hep out a bit.”) Five miles from the house, my contractions were two minutes apart, but still not causing me any real pain.
“I just want to get up and walk.” I whined.
“You want that baby to drop out of you like groceries out of a torn Wal-Mart bag?” Brian warned me. “You best stay off your feet!”
“I think it would make it better.” I quipped back.
“Wetter.” Brian corrected me.

Once home, I lowered myself out of the truck gingerly. I was instructed to go lay down while they put the hog feeder in the pig-pen. As I started towards the house, I heard David yell, “Pigs are loose!”
I yelled back, “Well I’m not chasing them this time! You can do it yourself!” And turned and began walking again. As I had suspected, the walking seemed to ease my contractions. After a few minutes (and a slow waddle around the house) they were down to five minutes apart. By the time David came back in, smelling strongly of pig-poop, they were down to seven minutes apart.

I called the army hospital and was told that a nurse would call me back in about an hour. I laughed and said I would start heading that way. The receptionist explained there was no guarantee I would be seen without talking to a nurse first. I figured I’d take my chances, and heaved myself back into the truck for the hour drive to the hospital.

When we arrived, they were kind enough to allow us to go up to Labor & Delivery. There, a nurse sat us down and lectured us on the procedures of the army hospital and teach us about Braxton-Hicks contractions.
“Braxton-Hicks contractions are the body’s way of rehearsing for actual labor. Everyone has them and I get so many first-time mothers in here, all afraid that they’re really in labor. It’s a waste of your time and ours.” She explained sternly.
To make her point, she showed us a chart that compared “real” contractions to Braxton-Hicks. She explained that if mine were real, I would know it and so would everybody around me.

She then hooked my belly up to a nearby monitor and asked us to watch what my contractions read. As the next one hit and crested, she quietly got up and left the room. Shortly thereafter a doctor appeared and checked the paper record of my contractions coming out of the monitor.
“We’re going to do a pelvic, and if you’re even a tiny bit dilated, we’ll be doing a C-section tonight.” He told us.
“But I thought this was just a rehearsal…” I stammered. “Maybe a dress rehearsal, but not the actual show!”
Suddenly it was like a spotlight had been turned on, and was aimed at me. Well, come to think of it, it had, but a little further south than the spotlights I’d been in during other productions.

Finally the doctor stood up, and removing his gloves, said, “No baby tonight, but we need to stop those contractions!”
I was given some kind of medication through an IV that made me very drowsy. The contractions lessened but did not disappear all the way. True to army form, I was released two hours after arriving and instructed to go home and go to bed.
“For how long?” I asked through my drowsy stupor.
“Until you wake up.” I was told.
“But shouldn’t I do some bed-rest or something?” I queried.
The doctor looked at me like I was an imbecile and said “What for?”
I was far to drugged to pursue the matter and ended it with, “Never mind.”

Later I learned that the primary reason I did not end up having Jake that night was because his fanny was firmly planted over my cervix like a big plug, and there was no way he was going to fall out “like groceries out of a torn Wal-Mart bag.” I was also lucky the contractions stopped completely by morning and I did not have any repeat episode of pre-term labor… even after chasing those stupid pigs one more time before giving them to Brian. I even threw the hog-feeder in the deal for free!

Four-Legged Guardian Angel

Warning: Kleenex Alert! Do NOT read this story if you are experiencing PMS or have recently lost your bottle of Zoloft!

If you were to ask my mother, I believe she would say that my first word was “horse.” If it wasn’t my first word, it was probably no less than my third. Considering that neither my mother nor father could be considered “animal people,” I believe this word may have taken my poor mother by surprise. I’m sure at the time she believed this to be a result of a popular 60’s children’s T.V. show called Mr. Ed about a talking horse, but little did she know...

Over the years, my interest for horses did not fade, but grew stronger and stronger. Every Christmas and every birthday, my first and often only request was for a horse, or if that was simply not possible, a pony. Of course as we lived in strictly suburban surroundings, an equine in the back yard was not possible, nor was it legal.

At age 6 I was finally old enough to take riding lessons at our local stables. For one hour every week, I was in heaven! I rode fat little ponies and skinny old nags, but it did not matter to me. They all had that wonderful horse smell, and if they were willing to move, I was willing to ride them.

As the years past, I found ways to keep riding, though money was sometimes tight. I worked at local barns, cleaning horses, stalls and tack in return for a lesson or two. When I was 13 years old I finally got that first pony! I spent every extra hour of every day with him, and learned all sorts of invaluable lessons, like how not to get kicked when brushing the “tickle spot” and that clean, wet ponies like to roll in the mud at the first possible chance.

At age 20 I decided to try a young, inexperienced horse. As money was tight, a critter without a lot of training was better suited for my tight budget. It was not long before a friend told me about a 2-year-old Thoroughbred who had just recently come off the race-track. He had been won in a poker bet by a truck driver named Butch who, until then, had been no closer to a horse than the picture on his “Polo” cologne. As racing and polo were the only horse related sports Butch knew of, he had the horse taken to a local polo club where he hoped the horse would earn his keep on the polo fields.

Needless to say, a young Thoroughbred with no training is about as suitable to polo as a Cadillac is to mowing lawns. The polo club demanded remuneration for the time the horse was kept on its property, and the food he was consuming. Butch could afford no such thing, so the horse was locked up with little food until the fees could be paid. At that point Butch made a call to a local slaughter house and found that the dog-food folks paid a pretty penny for healthy horses.

I got there about an hour before the slaughter house truck did. Though skinny and unkempt, there was just something about that horse that was… special. There was a certain honesty in his expression and trust in his actions that compelled me immediately. Something about his eyes spoke to my heart. I offered Butch $700 for the horse right then and there. Butch informed me that the slaughter house would pay $800 for the horse. At that time I happened to notice that Butch’s 3-year-old daughter had marched right up to the large animal, grabbed his lead rope and was taking him for a walk around the busy parking area. Butch seemed fully unaware of the danger this situation presented for his daughter, though he followed my glance and explained the horse was like a “pet” to his daughter.
I saw the weak spot and went for it like a vulture.
“Then what are you going to tell her when she asks where her horsy went? Are you going to tell her the truth, or just lie to her?”

Over the next five years, that $700 horse proved to be highly talented in the show ring, always gentle with children and small animals, and the best friend I’d ever had. We spent hours together, and could practically read each other’s minds. I felt I could almost see his soul when I looked into those eyes which were a shade of brown I had not seen before. I was offered large sums of money for him on more than one occasion, and thought nothing of turning it down. I would no sooner sell my mother, though the thought had crossed my mind.

In late September of 1995 I was near the end of my second month of my troubled pregnancy. I continued to bleed, and my body was simply not doing what it was supposed to. The army doctors told me not to get my hopes up that the pregnancy would last. It had taken me over two years to get pregnant, and this news was devastating.

As I was leaving for work as a veterinary assistant on the morning of September 30^th 1994, I saw that Mario had gotten one of his beautiful forelegs hung in the barbed wire fence. Where other horses would have struggled to free themselves, he was standing patiently, waiting for me to come help him. I threw the truck into park while it was still moving and jumped out to help him. Seeing that the wire had cut deep into the leg, I told him to stand still and I ran to the barn to grab some wire cutters. He stood patiently while I ran back and gingerly cut the wire on either side of the gaping wound, leaving a six inch piece embedded in his leg. I knew pulling it out could do far more damage than leaving it where it was, at that point.

I tied him to a nearby tree and ran to the phone to call my neighbor to bring a horse trailer as quickly as possible. I then called the veterinary hospital at Kansas State University to ask them to prepare for our arrival. I bandaged Mario’s leg around the wire to prevent the wire moving further, and led him slowly on to the trailer.

The veterinary team at Kansas State University took radiographs, and had him in surgery within the hour. It took them three hours to remove the wire and close the gaping wound. I had already been warned that the damage could be too extensive to repair, but I had to try everything I could to save my friend.

For the next three days Mario lay with his head in my lap. Of course I was warned by each shift of veterinarians that sitting with a horses’ head in my lap could end my pregnancy should he get startled or decide to move quickly. I told them all that I knew my horse well enough to know that he would never do any such thing. He was always so gentle, he was incredibly careful with me, even when he was lying in unfamiliar surroundings, poked full of IV needles and had a huge, metal brace on his leg. He barely even wiggled until I was ready to get up or move.

On the third day, the vets came to me with bad news. The damage was so extensive that the chance of recovery was almost zero. The only way to keep him alive would be amputation, which would mean my beautiful horse would never leave his stall again. He would never run with his neck stretched out and his mane whipping around my face. He would never walk with me through the sunset, back towards the barn at the end of a long ride. His freedom would be taken away completely, and he would be in pain for the rest of his life.

I made the hardest decision I had ever made in my life that day. It was up to me to decide my best friend’s fate, to kill him or condemn him. The best choice was by far the most painful. I could make no other choice but to say goodbye to Super Mario that day.

Mario followed me willingly down the corridor on his three good legs to a room with padded walls and floors. I held his lead-rope in my hand as the doctor injected a clear liquid into his neck. I watched as his eye clouded with confusion, and as his knees gave way under his beautiful, athletic body. I was with him until his heart stopped, and his spirit was set free from the bonds of his injured shell. I wept on the neck of his beautiful, lifeless body, taking in his smell so I would never forget it. I said goodbye to the best friend I had ever had.

As Mario’s heart stopped beating, another tiny heart grew stronger. The next day I went in for a prenatal check up to see if the tiny life inside of me had made it through the stress of the last few days. The bleeding had stopped only that morning and the cramping had gone away. For the first time, the heartbeat could be heard clearly on the monitor. My own heavy heart skipped with the joy of hearing my baby’s heartbeat for the first time.

The following March, my son was born. In those first few moments of life, they set him on my chest, and he opened his eyes and looked right into mine. I noticed immediately that his eyes were the most amazing, deep shade of brown… a color I think I’d only seen once before.

In memory of all angels.
Super Mario: 5/15/87 – 10/3/94

An “F” In Conception

I’ve never understood the whole “Birds and Bees” thing. Perhaps I missed a story somewhere about some strange intra-species love affair, but if not, I fail to see the comparison of a bird or bee to anything having to do with human conception.

To my understanding, first a bird finds a partner, makes a nest, has a little fun and lays some eggs. After sitting on the eggs for a few weeks, mom and dad bird spend their time flying about looking for food. In a few months it’s time to fly south, and they all part ways to go on vacation. The following year, mom bird finds a nice new bird partner and the process starts over.

Bees on the other hand are a completely different story. There is but one queen. The queen does nothing but lies in the hive and pops out thousands of eggs. She has a husband or two, but all the rest of the bees are drones. For those who are not heavily into insect social structures, drones are mundane little workers with no other purpose than feeding and maintaining the hive. If you are born (or hatched) as a bee, there is very little chance you will have the luck to be a queen or one of her trysting partners. You will probably be a boring little drone, running about with pollen on your feet gossiping about the bees down in Honey Production not keeping up with demand.

Humans are different. Not to say some of them don’t find a new mate every year like birds, but it’s not the generally approved method for creating a family. And of course like the bee, some people are so focused on work they forget to have a family. But other than a few freak similarities, our mating habits are completely different.

Through our younger years we do what we can to prevent a family. We won’t even hug our own parents in public… we wouldn’t want anyone to think we actually liked those people! Then as young adults, we court, but try not to conceive or marry. If we are intelligent young adults, we utilize good birth control methods and leave nothing to chance. We eventually find the person we hope will be Mr. or Mrs. Right, settle down and wait until everything is perfect before conceiving.

Once we realize that nothing is ever perfect enough to have a child and that our biological clocks are ticking so loudly they’re keeping us up at night, we decide to stop preventing a family. For those that did not conceive by accident prior to this time, most will conceive within a few months of “not preventing.”

And then there are the rest of us - a small group who, after not preventing for a year or so, actually start trying. And trying. And trying. And when that doesn’t work, we seek medical attention. And thus begins the baby obsession.

The hardest part about belonging to the group of those “trying to conceive” or TTC, is that while we’ve finally made up our minds that we want a baby (bad!), all our friends seem to just pop them out like toast. In fact it frequently happens that a fertility-challenged woman will be surrounded by co-workers who get pregnant by accident, and complain about it incessantly. Fertility challenged women just love hearing about how pissed off a co-worker is about not being able to sit in the hot tub at a friend’s party last week! Love it.

Eventually we start to see the irony in the fact that we were so careful in preventing a family for so long before we were “ready.” We did the right thing, right? We were the smart ones, right? Oh, what we wouldn’t give to have the “luck” of those unsuspecting high-school girls who, whoops, get pregnant seemingly from just looking at someone of the opposite sex. How do they make it seem so easy? It is simply not fair!

And why does it always seem to be that the people who want babies the least seem to have the most? We have to watch the news with stories of little Joey and his 23 brothers and sisters being put in foster care when it is found that their 34-year-old mother has gone on vacation without them… for a year.

Perhaps from these experiences we become better parent material. We spend years wanting what we can’t seem to produce for ourselves, and dreaming about what we’d do if we had just one baby. When we’re lucky enough to have our own or adopt one, no-one in the world could make us treat that bundle of hopes and dreams in a less than wonderful way – ever! Our children will always know how much we wanted them and needed them.

Then, after experiencing the sheer joy of parenthood, we simply must have another. And the whole process starts over again. It doesn’t matter what they look like. It doesn’t matter if their skin is the same color or their eyes the same shape. What matters is that incredible bond between parent and child – that pure and overwhelming love that comes over us like an ocean wave.

I admit it. I value the lessons I’ve learned through the years I yearned to be a parent. Perhaps I don’t react so harshly when little shoes show up caked in mud. Perhaps I’ve made less silly rules than I would have had this gift from God come easily to me. In my house, “Don’t touch!” was replaced with “Let’s hold that together so you can see it better.” “No!” was replaced with “I’m worried you might get hurt if you do that. I want you safe because you are so important to me. Mommy would cry if you got hurt.”

I don’t know how birds handle infertility. Do they count their eggs before they’ve hatched? I don’t know if queen bees long for just one more larvae in the hive. Either way, we as humans are cursed with the knowledge of and longing for what we don’t have, and sometimes without the understanding of how much we’ve already got.

Such was the case for my husband and me. It had been almost two years since we had “stopped preventing.” It had been at least a year and a half since we started making charts, graphs and taking temperatures... sexy! On a number of occasions my husband had left work early, telling his commanding officer that his wife might be about to get pregnant, and he wanted to be there when it happened.

I had read all the books and knew enough to realize that I was somehow not quite “normal.” Instead of the neat little twenty-eight day cycle women were supposed to have, mine seemed to be all over the chart. Sometimes it was as short as thirty-four days and sometimes as long as fifty-six days. I knew I was supposed to ovulate fourteen days prior to having my period, but as these were the days before ovulation detection kits, I had no earthly clue when that might be on any given month.

As the months came and went, I almost always felt sure that “this was the month.” My breasts felt sore, I felt grumpy and tired and my period was late. After two years I finally had to understand that those symptoms were just the normal PMS symptoms I got, every stinking month! Like taking a bite of food in a restaurant will signal the wait staff to come ask you a question, for me taking a pregnancy test always brought on “Aunt Flo.”

In August of 1994 I was feeling particularly bad. I was considering getting my hopes up, but then made that regularly depressing discovery in the restroom. Of course I did what any other warm-blooded depressed, monetarily challenged woman would do. I went shopping. How else could I keep my mind off my failure? On the way home I stopped and picked up a home pregnancy test out of habit.

I realize that sounds totally and completely idiotic. It was, yet it was also a compulsion at this point in my TTC career. I cried as I took the test, just knowing I was about to get another “F” in conception. As with every other month, I immediately tossed the soggy stick into the garbage and then grabbed it out again and sat staring at it while the wetness slowly soaked it’s way up the material inside the plastic. I closed my eyes, prayed, cried and lost all hope. I opened my eyes and witnessed the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

There were two perfectly clear lines created by my very own pee-pee on the test stick. Two of them! I cried even harder, prayed even harder and had two years of hope overcome my entire existence in that moment.

Throughout the rest of the day I planned how I would spring the big news to my husband for this was going to be one of the most important days of our lives. I didn’t have a pretty watch box and a gift would only raise his suspicions when I wasn’t supposed to be spending any money. I’d just have to hold it behind my back.

As he entered the house, I held both my hands behind my back and begged him to “pick a hand!”
“I’ve had a long day and I’m not up for games right now!” he said, pushing past me.
I positioned myself in front of him again and asked as sweetly as I could, “Please just pick a hand. Any hand!”
“You don’t even have dinner on yet?” he snapped at me. “I am hungry and tired and I am not up for games!”

I was so used to accepting this kind of treatment that it bounced right over my happy little head. I brought my arm around to my front and proffered the stick to him.
“What the hell is this?” he grumbled, taking the stick from my hand and then in horror he asked “Did you PEE on this?”
“I sure did!” I exclaimed proudly.
The slow realization of what he was holding finally worked its way up to the stony expression on his face.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” he stammered.
I then received one of the nicest and happiest hugs from him in the history of our marriage.

Later on that evening on our way back from a dull army function, my husband stopped in at the local pharmacy.
“What are we doing here?” I wondered aloud.
“I’m getting two more tests to make sure you didn’t mess the first one up and get my hopes up for no reason.” He said as he closed the car door.
Both of those tests showed positive results too, much to his consternation and my glee.

Though all the tests showed I was pregnant, as I mentioned before, I had also gotten my period. The bleeding came and went, as did my concern over the tiny life nestled deep inside of me. The doctors were a bit befuddled and told me simply not to get my hopes up. Like hell! After over two years of wanting a child with all my heart, I wasn’t losing this one! I truly believed that nothing in the world could have brought me down from my wondrous cloud.

How Victoria’s Secret Got Out

It was a beautiful spring day in early 1994. I had 3 horses at that time, and often enjoyed the beautiful, empty country-side from horse-back. It was perfectly safe to ride along the gravel roads because few vehicles ventured that far out into the boonies. A car could be heard for miles before it got close to the house so there was always plenty of time to get off the road if necessary. The house was so far removed, in fact, that I rarely thought anything of wearing a bathrobe out to the barn for morning feeding, or less than that out to look at the stars at night.

One Saturday morning in the summer while my husband was off doing some army thing, I was awakened by the sound of mooing. It took me less than a minute to shake off my dazed sleep-stupor and come to the conclusion that this sound was not being made by any one of my three equines. On top of that, the great noise seemed to be coming from at least 300 animals of a bovine nature. The nearest cattle ranch was about 4 miles down the road, and I was pretty sure the sound was not carrying quite that far.

I jumped out of bed, still wearing the cute little Victoria’s Secret string-bikini undies and spaghetti-strap midi tank top I had slept in, and trotted down the stairs to be affronted by a horrific view out the large picture window in the front of the house. A large heard of cattle had found the lush patch of grass over my septic system, and were slowly and methodically crushing my lateral lines into oblivion.

With thoughts of the backed up sewage seeping into my basement, I quickly headed out my front door to chase the offending cattle away from that area before all hopes of flushing went completely down the drain.

The grass was thick and green, and the cattle had little interest in my requests that they move on to less-green pastures.
“Haaaww Cow! Haaaawww Cow! Git! Giiiiiiiiiiiiittt!” I yelled at them in vane.
Soon I found myself standing in the middle of the herd, and some of the bovines finally started to move off a bit towards the grass around my driveway.

About this time, I started to realize that cows en mass are prolific producers of natural fertilizer, and that they are also quite loud! Not only was I covered in manure up to my bare knees, but I was half-deaf as well. I kept right on chasing, and finally had the majority of the creatures away from the danger zone.

As I emerged from the midst of the wayward herd, I bumped right into…
“Milt!”
“Hey there. I see you come accrost my cattle. I wanna thank you for… for taking care of ‘em for me.” (Cough, chuckle.) “Was they on your… lines?”
“Um, yeah.” I stammered as I made the dark realization that I had just exposed Victoria’s Secret to my 75-year-old cattle rancher neighbor. “I’ll let you take it from here.”
With that I quickly slunk back into my house, knowing that the manure foot-prints might not be the only thing that would follow me around for a while.

My fears were realized later in the day when I went into town to buy gas for my truck. As I walked in to pay the clerk, the crowd in the little café area grew deathly silent. The clerk flashed her smile at me, took my money and said sweetly, “I hope you didn’t get your cow-pokin’ duds too dirty this mornin’. In fact, a couple of the guys was wonderin’ if you’d just call ‘em up nex time so they could get dirty doin’ some pokin’ with you.”
With that the crowd erupted, and I made for the door, all the while looking for a large rock to crawl under. Over the next few months, I made the trek up to Topeka to do my shopping. Now, years later, I wonder what stories they tell in that little town about the strange lady from back East who got caught chasing cattle in Victoria’s not-so-secret attire.

Meeting the Neighbors

As I went out to check on the horses one last time one windy evening in March of 1994, I noticed a reddish glow coming over the hill to the north of the house. It was 10:30 at night and I reasoned with myself that due to both the time and direction, it probably was NOT the rising sun. I wandered up the hill to investigate, and came about as close to experiencing heart failure as I ever have. A large wall of fire fueled by the 40 mile an hour wind, was racing across the dried grass land directly toward me. It was still about 500 yards from our property line, but was wasting no time in getting there.

“DaviiIiiIiiIiiIiiId!” I yelled as I ran toward the house. “DAVID!”
An irritated voice replied from within the house “Whaaaaaat?”
“Daviiiiiid, there’s a FIIIIIIRE!”
“Where?”
“It’s (pant) almost (pant) here!” I managed to say as I reached the house.
We had been warned that the fire department was all but useless out where we were. There were no fire hydrants – just a small stock pond on the eastern portion of the property which would likely be serving up boiled bass by the time any fire trucks arrived. Frantically searching through a mess of letters and scrap paper on the kitchen counter, I finally found the scrap of paper the last home-owners had left for me that simply read, “If you have any problems, call the Freemans at the following phone number.” The Freemans were our new “next-door” neighbors who lived three miles to our east. We had yet to meet them, but this seemed as good a time as any.

I dialed the number as quickly as I could, and after a few rings, a motherly female voice answered. Doing my best to be polite and introduce myself, I quickly filled Martha in on the details.

“Honey, I’ll git the boys and we’ll be right down.”

We then stood anxiously on the front porch to await the arrival of Martha and “the boys.” Reminiscent of some lost scene from The Beverly Hillbillies, an ancient, red pick-up truck came racing over the winding gravel road, kicking up a long trail of dust .There were a number of shaggy looking men standing in the back yelling “Yeeeeee-Haaaawww!” and clearly enjoying the thrill of the ride. As they grew closer it became apparent they were armed with shovels, pitch-forks and wide, excitement-filled smiles that showed various missing teeth. Ah, The Boys were here, and apparently ready to do battle with ogres!

The mostly rusted-out truck, which seemed to be held together by duct-tape and bailing wire, slid to a halt in our driveway with billows of dust emanating from muffler-less underbelly. “The boys” hopped out and introduced themselves as Brian, Mark and Hoss. Then Martha stepped out of the cab and shook my hand.
“Here we are!” she exclaimed.

Once the introductions had been made, someone noticed that the fire was cresting the hill and starting it’s short decent toward the house.
“Oh, BOY! Y’all got a REAL fire here!” called Brian from his new vantage point on the hill, where he stood precariously close to the offending flames.
Buckets were passed about and filled with water. Worn-out, denim Wranglers were submerged in the buckets. My husband was handed a jeans-and-water filled bucket and instructed to beat out the fire with the wet jeans. Shovels were slung over shoulders and the pyro-posse launched its attack.

Martha took me by the arm and led me toward the house, calmly asking how we liked our new place and wondering if we had any “little-uns” yet. Before I could answer or break down in tears from the stress, she went into a long explanation of which of The Boys had kids, how many, what ages and how many had already ridden a sheep in the mutton-bustin’ contest at the state fair rodeo.

If it had been up to me, I would have been outside beating flames into submission with wearable, wet weaponry, but Martha would have none of that. According to her, women shouldn’t do that sort of thing because they never knew if they might have a “bun in the oven.”

“It don’t do no good to burn your oven while you’re cookin’ your bun.” she stated wisely.
I must say her freely given insights and advice worked quite well to take my mind off my burning property. They didn’t make complete sense to me, but just trying to sort them out in my mind made the time pass quickly.

After finishing her lecture on prenatal health, she asked, “You wanna go out on the porch for a cigarette?”

I was sure it would have been very wrong to start laughing just then. I held my tongue as I accompanied her out onto the front porch where we could see a number of dark, smoky figures moving about, silhouetted by huge red and yellow flames. The acrid smell of burning hay and trees was oddly soothing, bringing back memories of campfires and ghost stories.

“Where are you going, hon?” Martha asked as I opened the front door to go back inside.
“I know I’ve got some marshmallows in here somewhere!” I called back as I ran toward the kitchen.

Not long after, another neighbor who had seen the flames showed up unannounced from the west bearing more shovels and jeans. For the next five hours the men fought the fire, keeping it away from the house and barn. Martha and I swapped stories as we took cold beer and more marshmallows out to The Boys. By three-o-clock in the morning we were all covered from head to toe with black soot and grime.

The men had back-burned the property and kept the fire from spreading any further to the south or west. According to Hoss Freeman, there were rocky ravines to the east which would stop the flames soon enough. House and barn saved, the tail-gates came down on the trucks and everyone took a seat with a cold beer in hand. In the moon light, all that could be seen of our soot-covered guests and saviors were the reflections of the moon’s glow off a random tooth when someone laughed or the twinkle in a friendly eye. The party finally split up around 4:30 in the morning when Martha told The Boys to “round up all those old Wranglers” so she could get them into the wash. I have always wondered if they were planning on wearing them again, or if they just needed to be clean for the next fire?

Through our adventure we became fast friends with the Freemans. Sometimes new neighbors knock on your door bearing cookies or casseroles, and others show up Hillbilly style in the back of a beat up pick-up truck to help save your homestead. It seems these days it’s just nice to have neighbors that care either way.

* Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the toothless.

Mother Nature’s Revenge

I graduated from college and was then faced with the dilemma of what to do next. Taking my fore-mothers as my example, it seemed a logical thing to get married. In hindsight it wasn’t logical at all, but at the time I somehow thought it was something I was supposed to do. I couldn’t imagine life without some male figure making me miserable, so I said “yes” to an offer from a man who would become an army lieutenant in the October following graduation.

I had just a few months to throw together a wedding in the D.C. area where both my fiancé’s and my parents happened to live. Why rush in? Simple. He was to leave for Oklahoma in October, and everyone knows that good girls don’t live with men before they are married! I had dated him for eight months and I couldn’t just drive off into the sunset with him unless I was legally bound and gagged to him, could I?

I wasted no time and requisitioned my parent’s house for the reception, found a pianist and a caterer for the event and bought a size two wedding dress off a tiny window mannequin at the local bridal boutique for $200. The tailor cut the bottom three feet of fabric off the dress, sewed in a huge amount of stuffing where my breasts should have been and I was good to go.

In barely more than an instant I was married and off to Oklahoma. Oklahoma was… OK. I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it. I learned my duties as a military wife (barf) and attended the officer’s wives meetings on occasion. I worked at a crummy local day care center for lack of “real” jobs in the area. My husband was only stationed there for six months, so it was barely worth sending out a hundred resumes to all the local establishments. In Lawton, Oklahoma, the busiest industry at that time dealt in dancers of an exotic nature, and was not exactly my stiletto of tea, anyway.

I had brought my horse Super Mario from college, and we acquired a Boston Terrier and two more equines while in Oklahoma. My non-horsey husband simply could not be outdone by his wife and had to have a steed or two of his own. At least the extra horses gave me something to do once I quit my job at the crummy day care.

After the Oklahoma stint was done, it was on to the lovely state of Kansas. All I knew of Kansas prior to moving there was that it was flat and that without prior warning one could be whisked off in a tornado to a strange Technicolor parallel universe inhabited by musical animals, vegetables and minerals. In its defense, certain good fairies with annoyingly high, wavering voices, have thought it wise to send lost girls back there, so it couldn’t be too bad, could it?

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the north east portion of Kansas actually has rolling hills, real trees and no portals to other worlds. Even better it was the country life-style I had always longed for growing up in the D.C. and Philadelphia suburbs. It was easy to find our “starter home” with almost four acres and a barn. It was the first house we looked at and it was perfect!

The house was barely one thousand square feet, but it had everything we needed. We went to the closing and started signing our way through the sky-scraper of paperwork. I distinctly remember laughing upon finding out we could add flood insurance for a whopping twenty-five dollars a year. “You don’t need it,” the lender advised us but for that kind diddley amount we figured it would be fun to purchase just for the heck of it.

I had once seen an aerial photograph of our quaint little house and its land. I noted that our house was nicely nestled in a picturesque spot in the “Y” of the Blue River and the Missouri River. Other than finding the area strikingly lush, I never gave the geography of local irrigation a second thought until the summer of 1993.

Having tried my hand at car sales and selling men’s fragrances at a local department store, I had moved on to selling very “hip,” hip-hop clothing to adolescents and their forty-year-old parents with the Peter Pan syndrome. One afternoon I was exercising my brainpower to the max, making certain that all the team logo sweatshirts were folded in exactly the same way when the store manager called me over to tell me I had a phone call. As many of my co-workers were adolescents or suffering from the Peter Pan syndrome, there was a strict “No personal phone calls” rule that I was overtly breaking.

My manager stood glowering at me as I picked up the phone. “We’re being evacuated for a WHAT?” I slammed the phone back into its cradle and looked my manager in the eye.
“I have to go home now. The army reserves are evacuating us because there is going to be a flood.”
My manager clearly did not believe a word of it. It was made clear to me that I would most certainly be fired if I was making this up to go to a concert.

I rushed home to find military vehicles blocking off the roadways to my house. After showing my driver’s license to a uniformed male who probably didn’t shave yet, I was allowed to continue homeward. There were no outward signs of rising water what-so-ever, yet we started the task of moving everything off the ground. We stacked photo albums and books on chairs and the chairs on tables. We stuffed garbage bags full of clothing and necessities. We were in the process of throwing everything into the cars when we had to stop and wonder. Where were we going to take all this stuff?

We also had two cats, three horses and four dogs to move. The horses were taken to Kansas State Veterinary Center who had generously offered up stalls to animals misplaced by the flood. A veterinarian at the school offered to take our Great Pyrenees dog. That left us with just the smaller dogs and the cats.

The sofa and love seat were hoisted into the hayloft of the barn. All other hatches were battened down to the best of our abilities before the “get out” deadline hit. Making one last pass through the house was like leaving a dog at the vet to be euthanized. It was a beautiful evening when we said “goodbye” to our starter home.

Within days the house and barn were standing in four feet of sewage-laced water. It was truly an adventure canoeing home to visit the carnage. For safety reasons, no one was allowed to venture into the swollen river. Army Reservists were strategically positioned around the once-inhabited neighborhoods to prevent residents, thieves or thrill seekers from entering. We cleverly outsmarted the reservists by sneaking down to an empty corn field to launch a boat. Canoeing through corn stalks is odd enough, but it became truly surreal when we started boating past the houses of our neighbors and friends.

The first thing we noticed aside from our new indoor swimming pool was that the trees were full of every kind of critter imaginable. There were feral cats, mice, rats, bugs and even snakes seeking refuge in the branches. The flora was now about thirty percent fauna in my estimation. A kitten clinging to a Styrofoam cooler lid had washed up in a corner of the house by the back door. She had an insect infestation the likes of which no veterinarian has ever seen. There were grasshoppers in her ears and roaches covering her back. I wasn’t going to leave her there, but I sure as heck didn’t want to touch her! As cruel as it sounds, I upended the small, populated island with a stick and dumped the kitten and her residents into the water. As the kitted surfaced, I grabbed her and swatted off the remainder of the bugs. Though angry, frightened and wet, the kitten never thought about trying to jump ship on our way back to safety.

My husband and I had taken up temporary residence with some local college students. They gave us a room and allowed all our pets into the house too. After a few weeks when it became clear there would be no moving back to our own soggy house, my husband found the nastiest, trashiest, most dangerous trailer park in all of Junction City Kansas to move us to. The single-wide trailer was approximately sixty years old, but luckily it had been redecorated in the early 1970’s. The carpet was a lovely thread-bare, burnt orange, brown and green shag, though it more resembled the head of a burn victim. The trailer came fully-loaded, with holes in the floor (air-conditioning) and a leaky roof (shower).

I know somebody else in the trailer park had keys to our new abode because each day while I was at work, the sticky-fingered elf would pick a few things to permanently borrow. There were train tracks within fifty feet of the trailer, but luckily there were about thirty trailers in between ours and the tracks. That helped cut the noise down from the hourly trains. There were lots of children in the park, though I rarely saw any adults. Things like that always made me wonder.

We lived in that trailer for about three months. I say “we” but my husband was away for much of that time playing “soldier” with his army buddies. He assured me I’d be just fine, and even adopted yet another dog from the pound to “protect” me. The dog was huge, not house broken and barked non-stop for the entire three months. On a positive note, nobody ever complained about the noise. I doubt anyone could hear it over the roar of the trains!