Happy Birthday Britboy!

July is hot. Was hot. Possibly always will be hot. Except perhaps in Alaska. Where I don't live and never expect to. In Montana in July of 1977 it was most assuredly hot. Especially for someone very large with child. Even though I'm not scientifically, or analytically inclined, I knew when I woke up on July 25 th. that it was going to be a different kind of day. Not a Braxton Hicks kind of day, but a Real Thing kind of day.

He wondered if he should stay home, but I shooed the OC,then the MYC [Much Younger Curmudgeon] out the door to work. The base was across town. I'd be fine, I assured him. Yes, I'd call, now go already. I knew if I'd asked him to stay home,the contrariness of the universe would kick in, and nothing would happen. And I wanted something to happen. I was thoroughly fed up with being pregnant.

Besides, if he'd stayed home he would not have let me do what I had an overwhelming urge to do. Clean.

If about to have baby, must first clean. I didn't just vacuum. I moved furniture that hadn't been moved since we'd moved in. Dust bunnies that had settled into quiet corners and started families of their own were routed that day, because the gospel, according to mother-in-law, decreed that the skirting board behind the couch had to be spotless; no crumbs could be left to lurk in anonymity beneath the cushions on the couch; unreachable corners must be cleared of even the suspicion of cobwebs. Between the grunting and the heaving, a contraction would come and I'd down tools and get through it on the couch, and when it receded I'd get up and press on.

And so it went throughout the morning. By early afternoon I thought I'd better go to my friend's house. My two little people were going to play with her two little people when the time came. The time,I began to think, was at hand.

So we piled into the jeep and set off. And pulled over at the end of our road, for a contraction to pass. And drove like the hammers to get as far as possible before the next one hit. Which was soon. So we pulled over onto the shoulder again, until it passed. In this manner, drive, stop, breathe, repeat, we finally arrived at friend's house. Who promptly called MYC. Leaving little people in friend's capable hands we headed for the base hospital, where at five that afternoon our third child/second son was born.

I had been convinced this one was a girl. Poor guy. None of the names we had picked seemed appropriate. Not Aislinn, not Margaret, not Olivia. You'd have thought we had only discovered the week before that we were going to have another baby. Nothing pleased us. If I liked it, the MYC didn't, and vice versa. And of course the in-laws were consulted by telephone and had veto power. What can I say? I'd be smarter now?

Finally, in desperation, we named him for his father. Which made for years of confusion. But in his teens he solved the dilemma by telling his friends to call him by the last three letters of his [long] name, which makes him sound like a Russian space station. Took me years to get used to it, but finally it seems to fit, and it certainly is unique.

When he was a mere day old, nurses came to my room with papers for me to sign so they could circumcise him. What?? Again with this crap?? Didn't I tell them with my first son that we were having none of it?? But they kept coming, and kept bugging me. And tried to send me on a guilt trip, telling me I'd have it on my conscience if women he might be involved with got cervical cancer. I had just given birth to a beautiful baby boy. I didn't give a rat's ass about women, as yet unborn, who might fool around with him in the distant future. For these faceless creatures I should put my precious baby under the knife?? For a procedure that had no precedant in my family or my husband's? The nurses were disgusted with me. But I stood my ground. I was outraged that they would be so agressive when I was in such a vulnerable state. If I hadn't been Irish, and stubborn as a mule, they might have persuaded me that it was the right thing to do.

I'm not saying it's the wrong thing to do. But for me it would have been. Since then there's been a lot of controversy on the subject. I'm not sure if it still rages, but I never regretted taking a stand. A few days later we took our little bundle home, all of him, to his eager older sister and brother.

And a few days ago he turned thirty! On exactly the same day that his little nephew turned three. Unfortunately, "my bonny lies over the ocean," so getting together to celebrate wasn't an option. But you can bet all your parts, I was thinking of him in the sweltering heat of another hot July.