My life began with my brother ... not because we're twins, but because I was to fill the void in Mom's and Dad's lives after Mom had been forced to give him up for adoption.
     They were 18 when he was born, and they wanted desperately to wed and raise their son. The age of majority was 21, however, and to get married, they needed the permission of all four parents. All four said no. As Mom's pregancy progressed, her mother became increasingly adamant that Mom surrender her child at birth.
     She did this, on April 3rd, 1950. She wasn't allowed to see her beautiful boy in the hospital, to make parting easier. A kind nurse, however, brought him to her for one short peek, an intense glimpse that was to last, perhaps, a lifetime.
     Mom signed the adoption papers, with her powerful mom looming large over her shoulder, making sure she did. Mom noted in the small print that if the agreement was signed under duress, it would be null and void.
     If this wasn't duress, Mom didn't know what was. As soon as she signed, she vowed to turn the world upside down to get her son back. Long, crazy months followed, with Mom and Dad travelling back and forth between Jasper, Vancouver, and Edmonton too many times for me to keep track, no matter how many times Mom told me throughout my life.
     I got her to write down the details a few years before she died in 2005 - suicide by overdose at age 74. Her story's most touching when read in her own hand, so that's how I present it here, for any who care to work their way through her 15 half-pages of "Our Son Don". The short version is that they got him back, with four days to spare.
     I read Mom's piece aloud in Jasper in October, 2005, to commemorate her new bronze plaque next to Dad's in the beautiful Jasper cemetery. I love that place, where most of my old town resides now, row upon row of colourful characters and tales. Some of Mom & Dad's Jasper school chums, and a few other old family friends, shivered with me and my husband in the cutting wind, which took her unpolished words to the skies. Jim Baxter said after, tears streaming down his face, that it was the most beautiful love story he'd ever heard.
     When they got me started on New Year's Eve of 1951, their lives were little more than a fading hope and hard scrambling. Grandma let them stay in the spare bedroom at her and Grandad's house, but the less said about their difficulties, the better. Mom's claim of duress under her mother's formidable pressure had meant nothing in law. They could find no other avenue by which to claim back my brother before the statute of limitations made it impossible that coming April. They'd need money and a miracle, and they couldn't count on either, but they could at least make another child. They would keep this one, and they'd be a family. No one, no force on Earth, would stop them this time.
     They called me their New Year's baby, because I was born exactly nine months later, on September 25th, 1951. Mom had wished that I be born on her mom's birthday, September 5th, but I wasn't to be pushed around either, or pushed out early. Mom remained a loving daughter to her mom, despite their difficulties of Will, and my birth on her day would have been a happy connection to the woman I knew as Moe. (She didn't want to be Grandma, Gran, Nan, etc., so that's the endearment she chose. I knew Mom's dad as Pippi, an affectionate term for grandfather in Quebec. I called them Moe & Pippi, almost one word.)
     Mom's doctor was keen on my early delivery, for reasons I've been told, but can't remember. There's no one left to ask, which gives a strange feeling, like standing on a precipice where worlds of memories fall in and tumble away forever. Dr. Straughn had calculated my due date to be September 25th, but he admitted Mom into Jasper's Seton Hospital on September 5th and tried to hurry me along, but I wasn't having any of it. He sent her home, and and I came out exactly when scheduled.
     Mom was very thin when I was born - that's another story, which I only heard the day I was holding my own first newborn in hospital, a perfect example of her knack for shocking me now and then to the core until her last breath.
     While she was carrying me, she gained a total of about 10 pounds. No doubt that's why I ripped her womb coming out ... broke the mould. She bled a lot, but the doctor patched her up and gave her a blood transfusion, which saved her life.
     I weighed seven-and-a-half pounds - her poor weight gain clearly hadn't kept me from taking all I needed to come out at a perfectly average weight, after a perfectly average gestation.
     I was born at 6:30 in the morning on a clear-sky Indian Summer day in the Rockies. The sun was just bursting over the Colin Range of serrated peaks, in the centre of which sleeps Roche Bonhomme. His eternal profile is better known in town as Old Man Mountain.
     I am truly that place - conceived on a snowy, festive, wishful night in the dead of Jasper winter - and I am truly that day, born to a cradle of glorious peaks when the colours of fall shone vividly against blue-blue skies.
     No wonder I came out eyes first. I still can't get enough of nature's kaleidescope beauty and exquisite colours. The swelling of skin that leads the head out of the birth canal, called the caput, puffed up over my eyes, not the top of the skull, as is usual. My face was so swollen that my eyes were, as Mom said charitably, two raisins in the snow - two pissholes, another said less kindly and repeated whenever the obscure story of my birth came up. We haven't always been kind to each other, and the price has been high.
     My nose was swollen into non-existence - two tinier raisin in the snow, and I had random tufts of black hair. Mom said that I was a pretty funny looking kid, but Dad always said that I was the most beautiful baby he'd ever seen.
     He hadn't been allowed in the delivery room, not in those days. He saw me shortly after, cleaned up and swaddled in the nursery. He was then allowed to see Mom on the birthing gurney - while she was being tranfused, I think, but that's detail they took with them.
     Mom said he was too choked up to speak, this 6'3" lanky guy, 20 years old and looking like L'il Abner. She'd never seen him with a happier grin, eyes bright with tears. She said he just took her hand and swung it back and forth for the longest time.
     They'd won. They'd weathered the worst, and whatever hardships were to come, they had forever that most shining moment. I had a small, inadvertent part in it.
     Will, now a year-and-a-half old, was in Moe's good care for the 10 days Mom had to stay in the hospital. Then the four of us had a suite in the old Hartley house to call a first crude, crazy home (George Hartley, thwarted genius ... oh, there are stories!) Dad had a job for 90 cents an hour working at the Jasper Park Lodge, same has his carpenter dad had had at the same age. The spiral of time looped back and spun on.



Our Son Will