Post 9 A Rocky Start

The initial responses to the news of her pregnancy ranged from, “Oh, Elizabeth, how awful!” to “How did this happen?” to “Well, I’m sure you’ll make the best of it.” These were hardly the outpourings of joy Mama had anticipated. She burst into tears and excused herself to Polly’s sun porch to collect herself. Fortunately, Ellie Cahill, Mama’s best friend and confidante (aside from her sister Camille), followed with a cool glass of iced tea and all the right words Mama was so desperate to hear.

            “Oh, Elizabeth, what wonderful news!”

            “Do you really think so? Brad and I are so excited. What’s wrong with everybody in there?”

            “Meanness? Menopause? Oh, honey, I don’t know. I think you just shocked the hell out of ’em. I guess it’s been understood for the longest time that you and Bradford weren’t going to have children. That’s why they downplay the talk about theirs. No one wants you to feel—I don’t know—hurt.”

            “Well, they sure screwed that up today.”

            “I could go back in there and tell Polly her chicken salad is bland.”

            “And watery.” Mama suppressed a smile.

            “All right now. Here. Take a tissue and dab your eyes. Have a sip of tea.”

            “I must look awful.”

            “You look like a mother! Honestly, Elizabeth. Just glowing.”

            “Really?”

            “Really. Now, let’s get you back in there. My guess is they’re all trying to find the right words to let you know just how happy—really happy—they are for you. What say we give them a second chance? Just don’t tell ’em you’re having twins or anything like that. I think that would cause Maise Malone to have a stroke.”

            In true Southern Lady fashion, Mama’s bridge club came around. As Ellie had predicted, they righted their initial wrongs with an outpouring of true congratulations, followed by several tasteful and well-orchestrated baby showers in the months that followed.

In the euphoria of Kit’s arrival, Mama and Daddy postponed adoption, but renewed their efforts three years later as Daddy was rapidly approaching the upper age limit for adoptive parents. Against all medical predictions and advice, Mama found herself, again, happily pregnant at age forty. I arrived a small but squalling full-term baby weighing in at four pounds and eleven ounces.

After a rocky start, I grew.

Mama’s delight in being a mother grew also. So much so, that when Kit reached the age of five and kindergarten loomed, Mama responded with an emphatic, “No!”

Being “late” children, we were, predictably, spoiled by grandparents. My mother’s mother, Margaret or “GranMag” to the family, read to us from infancy. According to Mama, both Kit and I were reading by age three and “knew our numbers” by age four. “What’s the point of kindergarten?” Mama reasoned outwardly. Inwardly, to Ellie and my Aunt Cam, she confided, “We waited almost eighteen years for children. I’m not giving them up to school one minute earlier than I have to. Period.”

And, so, while our cousins and neighborhood friends headed off to kindergarten classes held at Wesley Presbyterian, Kit and I read aloud, learned addition and subtraction, and memorized poems from Mama’s favorite anthologies.

Our real education came from our forays into the surrounding woods or to local parks. Mama called them “nature walks,” but they were actually taxonomy outings made fun by the fact that Mama never made them instructional. Spring and fall were magical. Mama was a farm girl at heart and spent her growing-up years outdoors on the land that was her father’s farm. The land eventually became the site of Mama and Daddy’s home and the neighborhood we grew up in. It’s not surprising she knew virtually every tree and plant in the neighborhood: which plants you could taste (sassafras root), which leaves not to touch (poison ivy), which leaves returned every spring (sycamore and maple), and which trees gave us green all year (spruce and pine).

Venturing into the nearby woods, we saw any number of insects and animals. We learned the difference between a beneficial garter snake and a venomous copperhead, and how to identify and treat each (leave them alone).

Digging in the spring garden, we learned to appreciate grubs and earthworms, as well as the bees, butterflies, and birds that inhabited our backyard. In the fall, as crimson maple and golden oak leaves fell, we learned the life cycle of trees, the food chain of nuts stored by noisy squirrels, and the concept of hibernation as evidenced by dens built by skunks and hedgehogs. Long before the words “biosphere” and “ecofriendly” came into common usage, Mama taught us respect for the living things whose space we shared. Mostly, we were given the gift of keen observation.

Kindergarten could wait. However, first grade could not.

We were fortunate that, in the ’60s, the Kennedy administration put emphasis on public education, and our elementary school was one of the benefactors of this investment. Oakhaven Elementary was a testing ground for new grading systems and “tiered learning,” which was basically division of grade levels by aptitude: slow, average, and advanced learners. As first-graders, we had no idea we were attending an experimental school, but by the time we reached third grade, we were generally aware of the academic differences between classrooms.

First grade classroom placement and potential academic prowess were determined by a series of aptitude tests that were administered in the spring prior to first grade. Sitting at the lunch tables in the brand-new school cafeteria, we, as five- and six-year-olds, were subjected to three hours of testing prior to lunch, and four more continuous hours of testing in the afternoon. Test books were used to determine reading aptitude; oral questions were used to measure reasoning and problem-solving skills.

In the late afternoon of my testing day, after hours of non-stop questioning, I vaguely remember quietly placing my pencil down and resting my head on the lunch table, only to be awakened by the sound of shuffling papers and exiting children. Needless to say, my incomplete aptitude scores placed me firmly in the “slow” learning group. Mama and Daddy were later told that I was lucky to have been placed in first grade at all.