Nothin’ But Trouble

August 1948 • Sonora

I was welcomed into the family two years after Mom’s first breakdown, but not by her. She didn’t want another child; she wanted out. As far as she was concerned, I was a fifth burden tacking on eighteen years to her prison sentence. Another eighteen years of not wanting to be a wife or a mother, of not wanting to cook and clean and cry every day.

Just after midnight, Mom gave birth to me by optional cesarean, which was in vogue if you were wealthy. We weren’t. She wanted to have her tubes tied without Dad finding out, and Mom’s doctor was willing to do it for her. If she had it done while having a Cesarean, no one would know. It was illegal for him to perform this kind of surgery without a husband’s permission and it could’ve gotten them both in a lot of trouble. He’d been my mother’s doctor for years, though, and knew it would be the end for her if she had another child. Mom wasn’t concerned about it being against the law or a mortal sin. She was barely hanging on to her soul as it was.

Sonora Union Democrat notice:

CLEMENS, In Sonora, August 16, at the Sonora Hospital, to the wife of Carl Clemens of Sonora, a daughter, at 12:10 A.M.

Plucked from my mother’s womb, I missed the struggle from one world to another. With no heroic journey or victorious birth cry, no wonder I don’t how I got here. I was short-circuited from the beginning.

None of the kids knew Mom was pregnant, although apparently it had not occurred to my parents that questions might arise upon my appearance. Larry was fourteen and clueless. Carleen, thirteen, found out in catechism the month before I was due. Stunned, she said, “Not my mother!” She knew you had to have sex to have a baby and she could hardly imagine her parents doing such a thing. Of course, Carleen didn’t tell any of the rest of the family.

Larry, Carleen, Betty, Claudia

Betty, now nine, was off climbing fences and protecting the weak but took the news in stride; I would be her next foundling. Claudia, at seven—and up until I came along the baby of the family—found out when she went to the store after spending her usual morning in the library. When Larry told her she had a new sister, she was happy about this news, but that was before she found out she wasn’t allowed to touch me. The first time she saw me was when Mom held me up to the second floor window of the old Sonora Hospital. I was born a block from our house in the Bromley Sanitarium, a small two-story building on lower Washington Street where many Sonora babies were born. On my arrival home, Claudia, who was curious to see what I was all about, was continually ordered, “don’t touch the baby, don’t touch the baby,” so she didn’t have much to do with me, deciding early on that I’d be nothin’ but trouble.

Laying me on the dark mahogany dining table to change me, Carleen told Claudia to watch me and turned to get my diapers out of the sideboard’s bottom drawer. I rolled off onto the floor and wailed. Claudia, casually leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, got slapped and hollered at for not watching me. She was watching me all right, she just wasn’t about to touch me. She was no longer the fair-haired baby of the family, had lost her mother’s attention, was forbidden to suck her thumb, and wasn’t one bit happy about any of it. I sucked the two middle fingers on my left hand and rubbed Mom’s earlobe with my right. When Mom gave me cotton balls to rub between my fingers instead, Claudia sulked, “Mom never bought me any damn cotton balls.”