Never Say This to a Woman in Labor

19 11 2011
 
 
 
 
 
Vaginal delivery, Maracay, Venezuela.

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It was 1977.  I was pregnant with my first child.  We lived in Houston, and it was August: that meant, hot and humid.  I had been in labor for a day and a half, and I was getting tired.  Very tired.  So was my husband.

In 1977, the big deal about proper childbirth, was to “go natural”.  Meaning, suck it up and have the baby without drugs, because if you can’t even manage that, maybe you shouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place.  If you’re willing to give drugs to that tiny, defenseless baby in your womb, at this point, you obviously are going to be a horrible mother, once this child is actually born!  The baby that trusts you to care for it, to do anything necessary to protect it, is already being abused by this woman, who is now considering shooting up with an epidural and morphine and maybe even popping some benzos.  Call social services!  Stat!  We have a child in danger here, whose mother is considering not going natural! 

Militant groups of natural childbirth proponents flourished!  (As I recall, most of the militantswere too old to have any more children, or had never given birth before.)  People who had given birth and were a part of this militant group, either had pelvic canals so wide, they shot out the babies like watermelon seeds from their mouths, or they were lying, or just plain masochistic or sadistic.  It’s also possible they had a lack of prostaglandins, or just no nerve transmissions going from the brain to pelvis to brain.  Whatever the reason, this was a crowd that you didn’t want to mess with.  These were Olympian competitors when it came to natural childbirth.

So, if you did wuss out and take the drugs, you did not tell anyone.  No one.  It might get back to one of the militants.  Who knew how far they’d go?   The idea of a movement to create a constitutional amendment that required any woman who succumbed during childbirth and accepted those evil drugs should be spayed, was not out of the question.  Please understand, I am not demeaning those who go au naturale during childbirth or those who advocate for drugless childbirth.  I think it’s a wonderful thing, when possible. 

So pregnant women went faithfully, with or without their significant others, to Lamaze classes.  We brought our mats and pillows, and we practiced how to breathe.  Whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo.   Shush, shush, shush, shush.   Whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo.  Shush, shush, shush, shush.  There was a proper way to breathe, and an improper way to breathe.  Your significant other was supposed to be learning how to be your “coach”, and he would tell you if you were breathing too fast, too slow, not enough.  He was supposed to be learning how to get you a lollipop or ice chips, if you needed something to moisten your mouth.   He learned how to massage your back.  He was supposed to be learning how to speak soothing words to his coachee.   Above all, he was to continually remind you that “we’re going natural, baby, we can do this, we can do it!  C’mon, push, push, push; breathe, breathe, breathe!”  We?  I just did not get the “we” thing.  Especially, when I was at the height of one of those hellish contractions, I didn’t get the “we” thing.   

After two days of contractions so irregular and back to back that they did nothing to dilate the cervix, I was ready for this to end.  My then-husband was having a hard time not falling asleep, standing on his feet.  The doctor then decided to introduce me to what I think of as a truly evil drug: petocin.  Petocin makes a stubborn cervix do what it doesn’t want to do on its own: dilate.  While doing the job, it makes the contractions even harder and closer together.  My contractions couldn’t get any closer together; they were already doubling back on each other!  The nurse decided to “up” the petocin “just a smidge”, and “get this thing going”.  (There are times when certain words are forever engraved into your memory, and this was one of them.)  I was a small woman, about 5’5″ tall, weighing about 100 pounds, trying to shove a six-pound watermelon down a canal with a diameter the size of a dime.  I was not having a good time.  And they had just decided to make the contractions harder.

It was then that husband-coach spoke the fateful words: “Honey, you’re just not trying hard enough!”

It was very, very good that I was in the middle of one of the harder, folded-over-on-itself contractions, and that he wasn’t standing about two inches closer, or I would have slugged him so hard, he’d have had no face left.  The nurse took him by the elbow and led him out into the hallway, where, I later learned, she had gently explained to him that “Honey, you’re just not trying hard enough”,  is probably not the best choice of words when coaching a woman in the middle of hard labor. 

It’s a wonder that people ever have more than one child. 

©Janet Mitchell, November, 2011


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Dressing in the Dark

4 11 2011
Shoe Peacock

Every week, my department had a meeting.  The most important people were assigned prominent seats, with the cushy armrests, the rest of us got what was left.

I happened to be late and got the only seat left, which stuck out a bit toward the center of the room, which made me more of a focus than others.  Or maybe it just felt that way.  Anyway, people came to these meetings dressed impeccably.  I don’t know why, they just did. 

I’d dressed that morning in the dark, because my husband was still sleeping.  I threw on a favorite pair of heels, one of two pair I’d bought, and because I couldn’t decide which color I liked best,  I’d bought both the dark blue and maroon versions.

Fast forward to the meeting, where I found myself in a seat, sticking out toward the center of the discussion circle.  A few minutes into the meeting, people started giving me odd looks.  Was a zipper unzipped?  Did I have spilled coffee sloshed all over the front of my skirt?  Did I have donut on my face?  A bugger hanging out of my nose?  I checked each possibility, as nonchalantly as possible, and came up a big negative.

It was my turn to speak.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to stand.  I kept it short, because I swear, people were grinning at me.  What was going on?! 

The miserable, interminable-seeming meeting ended.  I scurried out of the room and into the bathroom to give myself a thorough checking-over.  My eyes stopped cold, as I stared at my shoes.  In the darkness of the morning, getting dressed, I’d slipped on one maroon and one dark blue heel.  It could have been worse, I told myself.   I could have forgotten to put my skirt on.

I don’t dress in the dark anymore.   But, if I have to, I make sure to check myself out in the light of day before parading into a meeting.  And I come early.  That way, if I do happen to have some sort of wardrobe malfunction, I’ll at least get a seat in the back row, where nobody will notice, anyway.

©Janet Mitchell, November 2011


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Embarrassing Boots, Thanks to Cat

4 11 2011

Life’s most embarrassing moments provide the most wonderful, side-splitting, tears-running-down-your face laughs.  But time has to pass before the laughter comes along.

I was a proud new RN, proudly sporting a brand new pair of nurses’ shoes.  I can’t tell you just how proud I was when I slipped them on my new nurse feet, striding up and down the hospital aisles, tending to my patients.

I sat at the nurses’ station, next to another young nurse.  We were documenting in our patients’ charts, side by side.  Sally and I exchanged occasional pleasantries, a reprieve from all that writing.  I noticed, after a while, that Sally kept looking down at my feet. 

“Hm,” I thought.  She liked my new nurses shoes.  I smiled.

Sally soon scooted her stool a bit away from me.  I thought she just needed more room to spread her files on the desk.

But she kept looking down at my feet, and scooted a bit further away, again.

“Do you have a cat?”  she finally asked, a bit shyly.

Big grin on my face.  I loved my cat.  “Yeah, I do!”

“Hm,” she said, no eye contact.

After she’d eyed my shoes for about the tenth time, and scooted her stool away as many more, I couldn’t stand it.

“Is there something wrong with my shoes?”   I asked, puzzled.

She paused, blushed, then said, “Um.  I think your cat might have used your shoe.”

I wrinkled my forehead, not getting the meaning of her remark.  Suddenly, my mouth dropped open, my face feeling red hot.  I sprung off my stool, and removed both of my brand new nurses’ shoes.  Nose into each one.

“Yuck!”  I exclaimed, with the first, unmistakable whiff of cat urine.

I still had another four hours to go on my shift, so there wasn’t much I could do, except powder my shoes, keep them tied tightly, and stay as far away from people as I could.  Which is hard to do when you’re a nurse.   

So the moral of the story is: put your shoes away.  Away, being in a box, up high, especially if you have a cat.  Anyone who owns a cat knows that cat urine is pretty much permanent.  No amount of perfume, deodorizers, Nature’s Miracle, washings; etc., will eradicate that potent, distinctive, gaggy smell.  And give ‘em the sniff test, just in case, before you go out.  Cat’s can be pretty sneaky about getting places you think they can’t get.

©Janet Mitchell, November 2011


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That Blushy Bottom Breeze

30 09 2011

It was a rather brisk, blustery November morning, 7 a.m.  I was, as usual, running late, with myself to get ready for work, and an eleven-year-old daughter to shuttle through the morning routine, then get her to school on time.  There was the inevitable, last-minute question,”Where the heck are my keys?”, which always puzzles me, because #1: I know I’m going to need them next time I leave, so why do I not put them away in the same spot?, and #2: why is it that I wait til the last-minute to be sure I have the most important thing that leaving hinges upon?  Go figure.  I do not have the answer.  More stupefying, and not at all helpful, is the absolutely predictable response from whoever is standing around, “Where did you have them last?”  Now, I know the question is intended to be helpful, and I usually subscribe to the idea that there is no such thing as a stupid question.  This is the one exception to that lovely, and slightly naive, philosophy.  That response is exceptionally irritating, because #1: I’m already late, and #2: I don’t have the time to answer that single, predicted, stupid question, especially when I’m already late.  If I knew where the item being searched for was the last time I had it, I wouldn’t need to be asking that particular question, now would I?

Fortunately, I had something awaiting me in the very near future, that would dispel the unreasonably high level of frustration and irritation I was currently experiencing.  I found my keys, gathered my dear, lovely daughter and my bag, which fortunately, was not missing.  Miracle number one was that the car started on the first try.  Dilution to miracle number one was that the gas gauge needle was hovering uneasily just below the “E”.  No time to waste, and off we went, faster than usual, as we all know that when your gas tank is on “E”, it’s more important to get to the gas station really fast, which of course uses more gas, than to get to the gas station later, even if you do have to endure the terrifying “coast” up to the pump.   I know, I know.  But the point is, we did get to the gas station, coasting or not.  The road was mostly downhill, which probably helped on that one.

I threw open my car door, and grabbed my wallet, simultaneously pulling out my debit card.  Remember, now, we had had a very rushed morning, and though I may have thought I was finally together and on my way, as it turned out, not so much.  I jammed the debit card into the gas pump slot and waited for it to decide whether or not it would reject me, as I impatiently watched the cars passing in both directions on the very busy, adjacent 5-lane thoroughfare.  Somehow, watching those people moving along on their way to wherever they were going, was irritating, and the gas pump seemed to be taking an excessively long time to do its thing, so I could eventually be one of those cars moving along to where I wanted to go.  I tapped my foot rapidly against the asphalt, presumably to make the pump do its thing faster.

The pump finally blinked at me, authorizing my plastic, and I whirled around in a single motion, pulling the nozzle from its slot, then whirled back toward the car to insert the nozzle into the gas tank portal.  As I did, I felt a sudden, cold whooshing sensation rush up my legs, moving rapidly toward the north pole.  The sensation exited somewhere around my collar region, and it was followed by another colder whoosh, following the same general, anatomical path from knees to neck.  I noticed the passing cars were slowing down, but didn’t know why.  At least, not til, at the third whoosh of cold air, I glanced toward my feet, and observed with horror my skirt puddled sweetly somewhere around my ankles.  I stood, panty hose and all my glory, exposed for all the passing commuters to see.  Oh, yes, and these were the extra sheer panty hose.

I would call it an awkward moment, as I tried to look nonchalant, while stooping to pull up my skirt.  We’ve all watched as someone slipped or missed a step and stumbled, then tried, with embarrassing futility, to appear as though it was all planned that way: I meant to trip on that bicycle or step, you know?  And the head tilts slightly up, in a weird, silly attempt at maintaining some form of dignity.  I was beyond that.  There was no point.  How can you nonchalantly pretend that you just routinely lose your skirt, while standing adjacent to a 5-lane thoroughfare at one of the busiest traffic times of the day, pumping gas into your car?  I’ve never trusted those zipper locks on skirts, since.   I also learned that, whether my skirt was lined or not, a half-slip is not an option, it is mandatory.  You women out there will understand the mechanics of all that.

Of course, I still needed gas, so after publicly redressing myself, I resumed the process of filling my gas tank.  The daughter, whose name I will not use, was abhorred beyond belief: “Mother?!  What are you doing?!  What if someone I know saw you, Mother?!”  She wasn’t asking, she was screeching.  Her head was tucked between her knees.

What can I say?  I still needed gas.  And, I was focused fiercely on preserving some sort of nonchalance, as I defiantly stared down the drivers that seemed to be were gawking in my direction.  Nothing to see, move along, folks, nothing more to see here, I thought.  Where was a police officer when you needed one?  Those people, with all their rubber-necking to see the woman by the gas pump in her panty hose, could cause a terrible accident, after all!

I’m sure there were lots of laughs around water coolers and lunches and dinner tables that day.  I made a lot of people laugh.   I can probably even take credit for heart attacks and strokes that didn’t happen, as the site of my morning wardrobe malfunction sent lots of those good healthy chemicals coursing through bodies, as the result of a good belly laugh.  Who knows?  I could possibly have lowered someone’s stress level enough to save a life that morning at the gas pump, in my panty hose, and not even know it!  The rationalizations continue.

My daughter didn’t say a word to me, for the remainder of the drive to her school.  And her head remained between her knees.  Apparently, none of her friends had seen her mother standing practically naked by the gas pump that morning, because nothing more was said about the incident by my daughter when she came home from school that afternoon.  Oddly, though, she always saw to it that my keys were next to my handbag in the morning.  I guess there’s more than one way to get your kids to help.  Personally, though, I advise just keeping your keys with your bag.  It’s easier that way.

©Janet Mitchell, September 2011


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Burn Those Growing Up and Liking It Books

23 09 2011

That day in Mrs. Ecklund’s 5th grade class, when all the boys got sent outside to play for an extra long recess, and the girls had to stay inside for a “secret” meeting, I should have known something was up.  Something big.  Something so big that ancient societies had a big celebration at springtime around this whole thing ~~ the menses.  (Now I know the whole, ancient ”celebration of the menses/life thing” was just an excuse for the guys to get drunk on their butts, while the women herded the kids, and cleaned up their husband’s vomit, after they’d passed out on the tundra.)  The recess thing should have tipped me off that some kind of a con was going on.  A really, big con.  And it was tilted in the favor of the boys.  (Get used to it.)  Besides that, the female teachers lined up against the walls, hands folded in front of them, and it seemed to me they were trying very hard to avoid eye contact with any of us.  That is never a good sign.

Mrs. Ecklund handed out these little pastel pink, lavender and yellow booklets, called “Growing Up and Liking It”.  (The “Liking It” part should have been a give-away, too.  If it was really that good, why would they have to have a meeting and a film to remind me that I should like it?  Wouldn’t I automatically figure that one out on my own, if it were true?)  The teacher loaded up the film projector (no Power Point, then, girls), and away we went, sweet lilting music playing in the background while an even sweeter female voice explained how, once a month we would bleed, and this was cause for celebration!  Because it meant we had become women!  (Huh?)

We saw a cartoonish illustration on the projector screen, where an egg-like thing (I think it even had a smiley-face on it) leisurely floated down this long tube, looking like it didn’t have a care in the world, while these grinning guppies came swimming like mad from the opposite direction, heading straight for the smiling, clueless egg.  The sweet voice from the projector said it was a sort of race, and the first guppy in was the last guppy in.  At that point, the door on the egg got slammed shut.  Wow!  My brain was reeling.  I’m not a visual or auditory learner, I’m definitely a kinesthetic learner, so you can imaging the difficulty I was having taking this stuff in.  I actually had smiley-faced eggs floating around inside of me?  And someday, a grinning guppy would swim madly after it?

Somehow, we went from the victorious, grinning guppy smashing into the smiley-faced egg, to a baby!  And then there was a house with a picket fence (the film was black and white, but I assume the picket fence was white), and a happily smiling man and woman posed on the walk leading up to the front door, and yes, they were pushing a cherubic little baby in a stroller.  The baby was smiling.  The man’s arm was around the woman, as he gazed, smiling, and lovingly down at her.  The man was wearing a suit, and the woman, a shirt-waist dress with nylon stockings (black seam up the middle of the back) and high-heeled shoes.  Yes.  This was the beginning of the con.

We were told we could talk to our moms about these “pads” that were specially made band aids that we would wear on a garter-belt-type of contraption, and that would made us look like we had a log between our legs when we walked, (only they didn’t tell us that part).   No tampons back then; well, they existed, of course, but we were cautioned that we could lose our virginity if we tried to use the tampons, so best steer clear of those things, or our future husbands would think he wasn’t the first one, or something like that; the implication was that tampons would turn us into rejects.  (Again, Huh?)  Long story short, the boys came in, giggling, after an extra-long recess, and the girls sat, red-faced, staring at their desk tops, their delicate little “Growing Up and Liking It” booklets having been stashed away in a Pee Chee (what we used to call our little notebooks or folders) where NO ONE would see them.

I’m now sixty.  I have left that wonderful menses time of my life behind.  I’m not premenopausal, or menopausal.  I’m post-menopausal !!  I’m happy to say that I have none of the equipment required to make more insane little people, and wouldn’t want to if I could.  I love my daughters dearly, but two is plenty, thank you very much.   My step sons, again, are wonderful, as well.  Between my two daughters and my two step sons, I’m sure we’ll be able to enjoy those cherubic little bundles of screaming joy to our hearts’ content, through our grandchildren.

But there are some really great benefits that go along with aging and being post menopausal:

#1- You do lose hair, but you also don’t have to shave your legs or pluck your unibrow or upper lip or ear-lobes or chin nearly as often.

#2- Your skin does get a bit wrinkly, but you no longer have to carry those little tissues with you to sop up facial oil, and except on special occasions, you only have to apply your make-up once daily, because it no longer melts off, and very seldom (I won’t say never), you do get a zit.

#3-  No more bloating.  You only have to keep one size clothing in the closet, instead of the PMS-size, period-size, and post-period size.

#4- You only have one basic mood.  No more crying jags, where you have to rack your brain to think up some good reason to justify the hysterical sobbing, just so someone won’t commit you.  You never again have to excuse your behavior by saying, “I’m PMSing”.  No more sudden, hormone-related depressions, no more unexplained (even to you) outbursts.

#5- No more cramps.

#6- No more pregnancy-testing kits

#7- Considerable money savings on a)pregnancy kits, b)tampons/pads;etc, c)pain meds, d)oil sopper-uppers, e)make up to replace the make-up ruined by the oil sopper-uppers

#8- Who cares if the UPS guy comes before you’ve got your make-up on and hair done?

#9- Let someone else worry about those thongy things, and how you hide the tampon string when wearing a thongy thing.

#10-No more having to avoid certain days of the month for dates.

#11-No more trying to figure out which part it is that I’m supposed to “like”.

So, see?  There ARE really good benefits that come with this post-menopausal thing, and getting a year older every year !   THIS is worth celebrating!  (And I really hope they’ve burned all those 5th-grade, pastel-colored, “Growing Up & Liking It” booklets ~ if anyone finds one lying around, burn it ~ just burn it!  You’ll save some unfortunate young woman years of her life and thousands of dollars in therapy, trying to figure out what’s wrong with her that she can’t “like it”!)

© Janet Mitchell, September 2011


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Back in the Day

20 08 2011
Motorola flip phone

Image by RobotSkirts via Flickr

It was a fine day in the springtime of 1979.

Cell phones hadn’t found their way to everyone’s pocket, pagers were the most advanced we had gotten.  There were still phone booths on every corner, like convenience stores, now.  And if you had a “mobile phone” attached with a cord to the console in your car, you had made it to the big time.  People would wait to make their phone calls ’til they got in their cars, just so they could be seen using their mobile car phone!  It was even better if you had a convertible, because that way, there was no chance people wouldn’t notice that you had a mobile phone and you, definitely, were in the money.  The Cellular One, Star Trekky flip phones were just around the corner, and those cost $.60/minute to use, so you had to be in the money if you ever wanted to make a phone call lasting longer than 30 seconds. Talk was charged by the minute, so if you went into one minute, one second, you got charged for two minutes.  Those phones were about a foot long, about four inches thick, and the same, wide.  It took two hands just to hold the phone and dial, so there was no “Talk, Text, Ticket” campaign going on yet.  People wanted those mobile phones more than almost anything, but of course, back then, nobody considered the possibility that their use could cause an early death by brain tumor.  They’re smaller, now, but I think they’re still selling like hot cakes, and as far as I know, the jury’s still out on the brain tumor question.  Makes me wonder how evolved we really are.

For those who couldn’t afford a mobile phone, we started getting fancier at home.  Cordless phones.  You could actually walk around your house while you talked on the phone, and not have to worry about getting tangled up in the cord, or running out of stretch.  People would say, “Let me get on the cordless,” just to let whoever we were talking to know that we were beyond those people who still had to rely on phones that were attached to the wall with a cord.  We still didn’t have caller ID, though, so you took your chances when the phone rang, and you answered it.  “Is it my boss, or worse yet, my school, calling to check if I’m really home, sick?  Is it that guy that I don’t want to talk to?  Is it that guy that I really want to talk to?  Is it my mom?  Is it a bill collector?  It could be that guy from that Clearing House Sweepstakes calling to say I’ve won ten million dollars!”  I’m sure it was some horrifically uncomfortable situation like that which spurred the invention of caller ID.  But we still had to get to answering machines, first.  It took awhile before we got from the answering machines that we had to physically stand there and listen to, (which was humiliating at times, when someone who shouldn’t have been calling, was calling, and was stupid enough to leave the evidence on a recorder), to the voicemail that was remote, no special equipment was required, and eliminated above humiliation, at least in that particular form.  Just call in from where ever you are, and as long as you’ve got your PIN, you’re in.

Instead of HD DVDs, we still had big, boxy VHS video cassettes, the kind that used real tape to record!  If you left it out where the dog could find it, you would come home to find a house redecorated, not with newspaper or chewed up slippers or the leftovers from last night’s dinner, but the shredded remains of tape, once your plan for the evening’s entertainment.    It was for that reason, I’m sure, that those VHS/Beta rental places were invented.  You could go and rent almost any movie you could think of, for just $3.99/night, and they even had a back room, where you could go if you showed ID that said you were old enough to rent and watch people who were too naked to be watched by someone a couple of years younger than you.  And if you didn’t have a VCR player, you could rent one for around ten bucks a night.  It came with lots of cords to plug-in here and there, and if your TV was too old and didn’t have an “input” plug on the back, well, forget it!.  No VCR or video cassette for you!

Now for computers.  A real computer filled an entire room, and only big companies had those.  People lucky enough to have a PC, didn’t call it a PC: it was a monitor, a hard drive with (huge) floppy disk slots, and a keyboard.  It was used mostly for data processing, and not many people needed that.  I remember trying to imagine what in the world people would need a computer for?  If I needed to calculate, I’d use my calculator; if I needed to write, I’d use my typewriter, or if I wanted to get fancy, I’d use a dedicated word processor.   A dedicated word processor did nothing except process words.  And it sounded cool to say you were working on your word processor.  Much cooler than saying you were typing.   Anyone who owned a full-fledged computer in those days, had to know how it worked, in order to make it work.  Everything computer was DOS.  The cursor blinked green on a black background, like a square winking eye daring you to type in a DOS command.  And it didn’t work at all, if you didn’t know those DOS commands.  My brother, who was pretty computer savvy in those days, assured me there was nothing I could do to hurt the computer, so just go for it, he’d said.  Experiment away, play with it, get to know it!  But there was one caveat:  NEVER, EVER TYPE THE WORDS FORMAT OR RECOVER.  When I asked why, he just grinned and said, just don’t.

Of course, I did.

And my computer screen went blank, kind of like that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Hal fades to black.   Only my computer didn’t say, “What are you doing, Dave?” before it died on me forever.

I’m sure I’ll come up with more, later.  But, this is where reminiscing will get you.  This could go on forever, and I’m smart enough to know that when I start longing for the old days, my mind is beginning to dwell on pure fantasy, on what-never-really-was-quite-that-way, and it’s time to get up and move around a little.

© Janet Mitchell 2011


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GRANDMA’S DENTURES

8 08 2011

 My grandma wore dentures, and she was Norwegian.  I don’t know what being Norwegian had to do with Grandma‘s dentures, but in my 11-year old mind, the two must have had something to do with one another.  She talked funny (she called me “Yanet”, not Janet), and she clicked when she talked.  I had never known anyone who clicked when they talked.  And every once in a while she did this amazing thing with her tongue, where she moved her top teeth up and down.  That, I was sure, also had something to do with being a Norwegian.   I would sit,  fascinated for hours, and watch her talk.  Sometimes I’d even just sit around the corner and listen. 

Grandma was not a small woman.  She was very tall.  When she walked, I imagined her having a saddle between her legs, way up there under those ankle-length skirts; her gait was a lumbering, rounded, slow-motion hurdle.   Even when she sat, her legs didn’t seem to come together.  Mom said it was because of all those kids she’d had, but I quietly suspected that all Norwegians had legs like that.  I remember wondering if the dentures and the clicking could possibly have anything to do with her legs not coming together, but I certainly wasn’t going to ask: this was a very private Norwegian woman living in rural South Dakota, who, at 40-something, found herself in the family way with the last of the litter, and she’d hidden in her house for the entire pregnancy.  Mom told me she was embarrassed that the neighbors would think she’d been “doing what married couples do” if they saw that she was pregnant.  Where else would the neighbors think my uncle came from?  

Grandma was not a shy woman.   Grandma was a bold woman: at 18 years of age, she sailed from Norway to New York, and this without any male or family escort.  I imagined that she’d hidden out for most of that journey, as well, because it was beyond inappropriate for a young, single woman to be gallivanting around the world like that: What would people think?  But she was consistent about things like that.  She did not believe in airing one’s dirty (or even clean) laundry in public.  Grandma would have liked the rule about locking up the president’s papers and keeping them that way for 50 years before allowing the public’s eyes to scrutinize them.  Fifty years have now passed since The Incident.  Grandma, rest her soul, is gone.  And this is where I begin the end of the story of Grandma’s dentures.

Dickie (he’s been upgraded to “Dick”).  My baby brother.  Curious little guy.  Always was, still is, except a little bigger now.   Grandma, with the dentures, was visiting us for the summer.  Dickie, being his  curious self, sat on the floor outside of the bathroom, ear pressed to the door.

“Graaaaand Maaaaaaa!  I gotta go, Graaaaand Maaaaaaa!”  Dickie sounded desperate, and I snickered into my hand.

I was sitting in the coat closet, peering out at the scene unfolding in front of me.  I felt safe, and a chill went through my skinny body.  It was that wonderful thrill of doing something that’s border-line breaking the rules, but I couldn’t help myself: I sensed something luscious was about to happen.

The bathroom door opened, the fan switched on, and Grandma marched past Dickie and the hidden me, without a nod or a word.  I stifled a snicker into my hand, almost giving myself away.  Dickie glanced momentarily in my direction, apparently satisfying himself that he was alone, and stepped into the bathroom.  He didn’t bother closing the door, because he was, he thought, alone.

Dickie sat on the toilet, partially hidden from my view by the sink and the stand-alone counter.  I could see his jeans crumpled at his ankles, his bare toes, and his curly-top hair.  He seemed to be in full concentration, as he stared ahead at the shower stall directly in front of him.  I heard a groan, then another, followed by an explosion of gas that seemed far too great for a 6-year-old boy.  I snickered again, then bit my thumb to regain control.

“Cool!!”  Dickie blurted loudly.  My eyes locked on the direction of his gaze, and I understood: There, for all to see, was Grandma’s Denture Holder.  It was overflowing with foam.  Which could mean only one thing: Grandma’s dentures were there. 

I could hardly contain myself to remain quiet, and the suspense grew even greater when I saw the wicked glint of curiosity spark in Dickie’s eyes.  He grabbed at the toilet paper, and managed to rip off a square or two, then proceeded to do his business with the dangerously inadequate, wadded up scrap of paper.  I saw it, as he moved his hands forward to pull up his jeans: his hands had done the job toilet paper should have done.   And it, apparently, had been no meager job.

Either Dickie’s curiosity got the better of him, or he didn’t notice the lumpy brown substance on his hands.  I watched with a mixture of excitement and horror, and maybe just a tad of queasiness when I thought about where those dentures would go next,  as he reached across the counter and grabbed Grandma’s dentures from the holder.  Though I can’t be certain, I thought I saw a look of panic cross Dickie’s face, as he looked from hands to denture.  He threw his arms away from his body, and the dentures went clattering to the floor.  At that very moment, Grandma came round the corner, and Dickie slammed closed the bathroom door.

Later that night, Grandma’s dentures got cleaned with a little help from me.  I didn’t tell Mom and I didn’t tell Grandma, but I had a good one to hold onto for as long as I needed.  Sometimes it’s good to have something like that in your pocket.

©Janet Mitchell, August 2011


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