WyzWmn's World©

When he left the Navy, the father joined a provincial police force. A job of integrity and honour?a refuge from the family business. There’d be no “Funeral Directing” for him. He was gonna save the world.

He was first stationed in a small town in Lanark county, Perth, on the River Tay.

He made $2000.00 a year and worked endless hours. When he wasn’t working because he had to?he was working because he wanted to. He loved the job. He loved the drama, the adrenaline, the fighting and the brotherhood. He loved being top dog and having people have to do as he told them. He had gone from the safety of his mother’s home, to the camaraderie of the Navy to the brotherhood of the blue. Security in male bonding.

Sometimes it was hard on the mother, but most of the time she figured that it was normal. Her own father had been the same kind of a man to a degree?always working or gone playing music for dances all over Saskatchewan. That’s just the way things were. She was from the “burn your ass and sit on the blister” era anyway. It’s not like she would have said anything if she had thought to.

They lived in an apartment over the local grocery store. Another police officer lived down the hall. So the mother had company of sorts. Even if she didn’t like the lady the man was a cop and that should be good enough.

When they first started out they couldn’t even afford furniture, so they sat on bundles of newspapers and the baby slept in the bathtub. It stands to reason that when one of them needed to bath the other spent the time holding the girl.

Eventually they bought furniture and settled into family life of sorts.

The mother and the little girl spent a lot of time together because the daddy was always working…even when he wasn’t. Besides the daddy got mad easy and it was just better for the mommy and the little girl to be quiet and let him sleep. When he was home the daddy yelled a lot. He believed in “spare the rod and spoil the child”

Once when the mommy was doing laundry the little girl got up on a chair to help. While the mommy was on the balcony hanging the laundry…the little girl tried to put some clothes through the wringer washer but caught her arm instead and hurt herself and screamed for her mommy. The mommy came to the rescue and made it all better, but when the daddy came home he yelled at the little girl and told her to be more careful.

The little girl became very good at saying “I’m sorry”…at a very early age she understood the value of repetition and she actually said it so often it became a mantra. She never knew what she was sorry for…but she knew she’d better be sorry if she knew what was good for her.

Sometimes they had parties and there are still pictures of the precocious little girl in her cowgirl suit with her little Stetson on her head, a beer bottle in one hand and a cigar butt in the other. There are also pictures of the little girl kissing a stand up dolly bare-assed nekid….the little girl that is.

Once the mother came into the kitchen to find the little girl standing on the top of the fridge. No chair or counter in sight. That was when the mother started to call her “Zelda queen of the apes” and it was also when the mother began to understand that the little girl was different than other children. Things just happened around her. Trouble seemed to levitate towards her.

When the little girl was 5 or 6 the mother had to go to British Columbia to visit relatives by train. She went to her doctor for a check up before she left and that Dr said “you can’t be planning to spend 3 days and 3 nights locked up in a berth with that little hellion!” So he gave her a prescription for a tranquilizer to keep the child quiet on the trip.

The first day the mother gave the little girl her pills and the little girl bounced off of the walls like she’d been shot from a cannon. (this is when the mother discouvered that the little girl often had “mirror image” reactions to drugs) The little girl ran from the observation car at one end of the train to the dining car at the other over and over and over again. No amount of running, calling, begging, threatening or cajoling would allow the mother to control her.

Late at night, in a brief moment of lucidity the mother put the little girl in their berth, on the inside, and went to sleep. She awoke at perhaps 4 in the morning to the unmistakable sound of the little girl chatting with the car man and peeling hard-boiled eggs. The mother gave up and took the tranquilizers herself.

It started out hard, right from the beginning, cause she was born sick.

Not the kind of sick that comes with a cold or the flu. And definitely not the kind of sick that one could recognize from the outside.

Never the less, she was born sick.

Her mother tells the story, at times with dismay and often with affection.

“You see, there was something wrong with her right from the time I brought her home from the hospital…no, no, …it was before that….”

Apparently, from the moment of her birth, from the very first second that her mother laid eyes on her, her mother knew that there was something wrong with this child. But in “those days” all the doctors kept telling her that she was but a nervous, new mother, and if she would just calm down the baby wouldn’t sense her unease and would be “just fine”.

“Fine” the mother would wail…”this child can vomit at fifty paces!”

At the time of her birth, they were New Brunswick, in the Navy, “met and married” (they would later grow fond of saying). A refuge for the mother…a place to be an independent woman in an era of Victorian views, and an attempt at “being his own man” for the father…an escape from a tyrannical father.

Yes, they met and married in the Navy. Married in their blue serge uniforms…a wren and a sailor. When she found out that she was pregnant the mother left the Navy, but the father stayed on…to support his family.

After she was born, they had to leave the Navy base. Children weren’t allowed in the married couple’s barracks. So the mother packed while the father worked. And when she wasn’t packing, the mother held her daughter and she sat on a crate rocking her, adding her own wails to that of the screaming child.

The story goes that when the movers arrived, with the big truck, one of the moving men came and stood in the door and watched the mother holding the baby, and listened to them cry. Cry and rock, rock and cry.

The moving man tried to talk to the mother, to calm her down. But the mother was inconsolable. She knew her daughter was dying.

Now comes the first of the “little oddities” that would come to define her life. The small coincidences that held her apart from the rest of the world in her mind’s eye.

The moving man had a sister. The sister was a nurse. A nurse that worked for a pediatrician. A pediatrician with a horrendous waiting list and a passion for protocol. The moving man sees the terror in the mother’s eyes and calls his sister at her job. The sister tells him that he is nuts, and that she is not bothering the “great doctor” with her brother’s fancy.

But the moving man pleads with her and eventually she relents. She speaks to the doctor, and he in turn eventually speaks to the mother…

“When you touch the baby’s stomach, does it ripple?” Asks the doctor.

“Yes”, snuffles the mother.

“Does she have projectile regurgitation?”

“Wh…What?”

“Can she puke and hit the far wall?”

“She hasn’t kept a bottle down since she was born.”

“How old is she?”

“She’s only twenty one days old and she’s gonna die!” Wails the mother.

“Madam”…says the doctor…”get that baby to the hospital immediately…right now, do not stop to get her a bottle, do not stop to change her diaper, do not stop to put on your lipstick, do not even stop to find your purse. Get that child here immediately…a matter of life and death!” (And the mother thought that she was frightened before.)

The moving men rush out and uncoupled the transport truck from the trailer and the mother climbs up into the cab with the wailing child. The moving man rushes them to the hospital…careening around corners and running lights. The doctor rushes the baby into surgery and in a matter of hours, saves the girl child’s life from an ailment that usually only happens to boys.

So at the age of twenty-one days, she has her first scar…almost a second belly button. And has lived through the first of the many coincidences that will make her who she is.

She has survived the beginning of the good fight.