Coming Home

Bringing a new baby home from the hospital is always joyous occasion, but bringing home a baby who was not expected to make it is quite a landmark, in any book. My parents were overjoyed when, after three long weeks, they were finally allowed to bring their new baby daughter home.

Home was a small 3-bedroom brick home in a brand new neighborhood in suburban Houston called Overbrook. The appellation “Overbrook” was a bit misleading. There was no brook, only a muddy, sluggish bayou called Sims Bayou, but I supposed the developers thought Overbrook sounded more inviting to potential home buyers. In fact, in that rather desperate, all-of-our-streets-have-to-have-a-theme mode that developers get into, most of the surrounding streets were named for birds: Heron or Thrush or (god-forbid) Flamingo. Our street was named Hirondel. I looked it up once; it means “swallow” in Latin. What were they thinking? I promise you, dear reader, most of the residents who lived on Hirondel Street in the 1960’s hadn't the slightest clue their street name meant swallow in Latin.

Besides having some rather odd ornithopic delusions of grandeur, Overbrook was also very Catholic. As a child, I once asked my mother why we, as good Southern Baptists, lived in an all-Catholic neighborhood. She just shrugged and said something vague about how our little house was just perfect for us, but I later got the whole story out of her.

During the Korean War, my dad joined the naval reserves, but he was never stationed overseas. After a couple of years of leading a rather nomadic life (they lived in shabby little apartments everywhere from sunny Key West to freezing Boston), my parents wanted a permanent home. They rushed back to Houston and bought the first little tract house they found. I think they paid $7000 for it. Turns out our home was one of the first spec houses built in modest Overbrook. It was the first house built on Hirondel Street. Only after my parents had bought the house did they learn that the Catholic Church was planning to build a huge complex called “Our Lady of Mt. Carmel” just a few blocks over. The entire neighborhood turned Catholic overnight, but my parents--childless at the time--shrugged and stayed put.

When I was older, my mother confessed to me that they had bought in “too big a hurry” and many times wished they had instead bought a home in the nearby neighborhood of Garden Villas, where later I went to elementary school and to church and to Brownies and everything else. But my experiences growing up in Overbook in the wild and woolly 1960’s were quite priceless and I wouldn’t trade them for any other history.

But to return to our story, I was finally ensconced safely in the little white bassinet in the little brick house on Hirondel street. My mother, well-rested after three weeks of enforced bed rest, was ready to take on the challenges of new motherhood. But something was wrong. The baby wouldn't quit crying--or spitting up--or projectile vomiting. What could it be? Was she just a bad mother? Did she not know what to do? Everyone told her it was just the colic. Not surprisingly, my mother couldn't quit crying either.

In that peculiar way that doctors had back then, each doctor had his own office and his own staff, and there weren't any large pediatric practices with multiple doctors taking turns being "on call". My doctor was taking his annual summer vacation and there was no one else available until he returned. For two long weeks my mother was at her wits' end as she struggled to cope with a screaming, colickly baby. When the doctor finally returned he pronounced I was allergic to baby formula and that my mother must feed me soy milk instead. Soy milk?

You must remember that my mother had had no opportunity to breast feed me, even if she had wanted to, which was highly unlikely. I was nearly a month old by the time I came home, and her milk had long since dried up. Breast feeding was strongly discouraged by the modern medical community of the 1950's and was looked down upon as being extremely old-fashioned and slightly unclean. New mothers, forced to stay in bed in the hospital for up to two weeks' recovery time after giving birth, readily submitted to having their tender, swollen breasts bound after childbirth to stop their milk from coming in, while down in the nursery, the staff took care of feeding the babies. Breast milk was considered a poor substitute for modern, clean, sanitized baby formula. But soy milk was a hard-to-find commodity and expensive to boot.

However, on the doctor's advice the switch in formulas was made and the baby, thankfully, finally quit crying and began to thrive. There was peace and joy in the little brick house at last.

Where to Begin?

I was born in the muggy summer heat in the bayou city of Houston, in the great state of Texas, in June of 1957. It was not a very auspicious beginning. My parents were healthy 27-year olds, but there was a problem. My mother was RH- and my father was RH+. What that means is virtually from the moment of my conception, my mother’s body was fighting to rid itself of the parasitic being lodged in her womb.

Nowadays, modern medicine can fix the problem of RH incompatibility between a fetus and a mother with a simple injection. But in 1957 there were no injections, and so I was born in a very poor state of health. I don’t recall the number of blood transfusions I received in the first three days of my life, but Daddy always said I looked just like a little pincushion.

There were no neonatal care units in the hospitals in 1957. There were only doctors in white lab coats and nurses in starched white uniforms. Medical care was determined by people, not by machines. Hermann Hospital came equipped only with a standard maternity ward and nursery, but the nurses there took very good care of me. My liver was not functioning at first, and I was quite jaundiced and sickly-looking. The doctors told my parents that they might could “go in there” and clean out my bile ducts, but there was nothing they could do for my liver. For three long days my parents waited in terrified suspense while I clung to life like a tiny mewling kitten.

Luckily for me, however, my liver did finally begin to function, and I slowly began to thrive. Mama was sent home from the hospital after the requisite 10 days, but I spent three weeks in the hospital before I was allowed to come home. Daddy came to see me every evening when he got off work, but my poor mother was "confined" to home as was the practice of the day. I can only imagine her anxiety and distress while she waited. On the day of my release, as a word of warning, the doctor also told my parents that I would always be a rather weak and sickly child, prone to illnesses and infections. He must have scared my poor parents to death.

Something I probably should have told you at the beginning was that I was not my parents’ first child. (That’s the problem with these life stories. Life is rarely linear; it has all kinds of twists and turns, and until you have the whole background, nothing makes sense as it should.) My parents had already lived through the terror and grief of losing a child once before.

My parents were married in February 1950. They were both 20 years old. They had a one weekend honeymoon in New Orleans and then came back to Houston to resume their lives. But to their great surprise, my mother had become pregnant on her wedding night and almost exactly 9 months to the day, in November 1957, they had a baby boy.

My brother was not as fortunate as me. Again, there were complications because of my parents' RH incompatibility. He only lived a few hours and then he died. My parents were grieving and shell-shocked. They had not even been married one full year, and already they had had to bury a child. It took them seven years to work up the courage to try again. My mother once told me that if I had died also, she would have never tried to have another child. It was just too hard for her.

But, obviously, this time the story had a happier ending. And at the tender age of three weeks, my parents were finally able to bring me home.