I’m trying to remember when I met my mother. She met me on the day I was born, and we spent the next week together. Fathers weren’t welcome at deliveries then, so Dad dropped her off at the hospital and she went in and had her first baby. To top it all off, the world was in the midst of — wait for it — the Asian flu pandemic, a global pandemic of the influenza A virus. A vaccine was released a couple of weeks after my birth, and the rapid deployment of same helped contain the virus. All that to say, the hospital allowed no visitors, and because a birth meant a stay of nearly a week, poor homesick Mom was on her own with me. Naturally, I have no memory of this.
When I was born my mother met me, but I have been wracking my brain to remember when I met her. Technically, that first meeting was mutual, but is it truly a meeting if I can’t recall it? Photos tell me we spent formal time together, sitting with my father and with various grandparents in generational poses. In other pictures, disembodied hands bathe me and cradle me, and I sit in front of a Christmas tree. Parental folklore tells me we spent time together walking the circuit of a small upstairs apartment in the farmhouse where we lived: around the kitchen table, down the hall, around the living room, down the hall, and so on, and so on while colicky me cried. He
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