Anitiyah!

I am borrowing that name from a book I am reading. I want to write a story about my daughter and want to preserve her privacy. This is my youngest daughter born in the early 60's, a time of great awakening, efforts at peace, and a degree of safety I don't think we will see anymore. Aniy was two weeks old when we were going to move to a new job, and a new home. Her birth had seemed to have been fraught with suspense as I thought I was in labor, but it was so light it might just be an upset stomach. We decided to drive to the town where the hospital was and wait at a friends home. We would leave our two other kids there while I was in the hospital. The friends finally shooed me out of there as they were sure I was going to give birth in their living room. So I got to the hospital and went through the usual preps and indeed I was in active labor. Aniy was born a couple of hours after I got to the hospital, and they put me in a room afterward with the only other person in the maternity section of this little old hospital run by Catholic nuns. The ward was on the third floor and to get there you climbed three flights of wide stairs. I think there was an elevator, but the nuns always walked up and down the stairs. Maybe they had to do that as a penance. You could hear the stairs creaking when anyone was on them. In my memory it seemed a dark place, but it was night when I gave birth.

I was really tired and dozed, but my roommate shook me wake to tell me she could hear dripping. I was hemorrhaging. We managed to get ahold of the nun in charge, I think I had a bell to ring, but my roommate did actually go out in the hall to look for someone, and the nun came up to check me. She elevated the end of the bed, changed all the covers and packed me, and massaged my belly, telling me to do the same. It was an agony trip, and I was so tired. I kept trying to keep kneading my belly, but would fall asleep. I think I must have finally stopped bleeding, and did sleep as I was soon out of the hospital. I am pretty sure they only kept you a day or two back in the early 60's. At home I attended to getting ready to move. What a mess. Three kids, one a newborn, and I was so weak I could barely do anything. I also was breast feeding this little bitty girl. We also had a big black cat named Linus.

We had a VW bug and we would drive that car to the new home with three kids, the cat, and what luggage we really needed to make the trip. A moving company had all our other household things headed to the new home. I really do not remember much other than trying to keep the kids quiet, and tending to the new baby, and hoping the cat would settle down. The meds we got to quiet the cat did the opposite. The cat was yowling and hyper and moving around, and we were all going a bit nuts. The cat was a big cat, and we finally stopped at a Vets office in some little farm town in Wyoming and asked them to keep the cat until we could arrange to get it to where we were going to live. This was the start of many cat fiascos in my life that I still cannot forget. We never got the cat back, and if we are to believe the Vet, our cat went to a good life as a barn cat. I really hope so!

We did make it to the new home in a small mining town at 10,000 feet, and moved into a motel room. I immediately ended up in bed as I began to hemorrhage again. So I had a little travel bed with Aniy in it next to my bed, and the other two kids were just going to have to entertain themselves while their Father was out arranging for us to have an apartment, and to await for our goods to arrive. It was pretty miserable. I went through this town a couple of weeks ago, and the motel is still there, and it pretty much looks the same. It is right on the main road through town, and rather stark.

When we finally moved into our apartment, it was on the second floor, had two bedrooms, a kitchen where you also ate, and a small living room. It was a beginning. The house we had moved from at a mine site in Montana was basically three shacks tacked together. It also had two bedrooms and was one among six houses up a dirt road at a phosphate mine. I guess I should write about this place in the hinterlands of Montana. So that will become an aside from the story of Aniy. To be continued!