Great Depression

While Grandma, being my mother’s mother, seemed to worry about her two grown children and us six grandchildren, it certainly was understandable. Grandma lost her first baby while giving birth.

It was during the Great Depression. She and Grandpa had met, fallen in love, and married. Mother once mentioned, while of course it was never discussed, how her parents might have had to get married. Whether this is true or not, we may never know and honestly find it irrelevant. They were in love and lived very happily together for over fifty years. My aunt (who I am blessed to share middle names with not only her, but with my grandmother) was my grandmother’s first of three children.

While I chose to give birth at home, it was simply the norm when my grandmother gave birth. And, while I chose to go through my pregnancy and birth of our precious baby boy without any medication or ultrasounds, my grandmother also experienced the same. Many details of my grandmother’s three pregnancies will forever be unknown. Yet the death of her first baby will forever remain in my heart.

I remember my family visiting my grandparents one Sunday afternoon, something we always looked forward to. This particular Sunday afternoon was no different. I was about seven or eight years old at the time. We loved going upstairs in their old farmhouse, visiting the mysteries still tucked away in my mother’s and uncle’s long forgotten bedrooms. Grandpa would occasionally open up a very large and very old trunk in which he kept such things as postcards and photos from long ago, bringing them downstairs for all to see. This afternoon he showed us a photo of a newborn baby in a tiny little casket. And this was the afternoon we children learned we had an aunt, my grandmother’s first child.

It wasn’t an awkward or dark discussion, but warm and peaceful. I felt nothing but love for my grandparents and for her, this aunt whom I very quickly came to love. It just seemed an appropriate time for my grandparents to introduce us children to a family member we had not yet met. Granted it would be years before Mother would share more details of her older sister’s birth and passing, a sister she and my uncle never met, a sister nonetheless.

Having given birth to a beautiful baby boy, my Mother’s Day baby, and then many years later, losing our precious daughter in miscarriage, I have often wondered just how my grandmother dealt with the loss of her first baby. I also can’t help but wonder how she felt with her pregnancies and births of my uncle and my mother. Her seeming to be a bit of a worrier when it came to her adult children and us grandchildren makes so much sense now. I wouldn’t consider it a case of her being a worrier, but of her knowing the loss of a child causing her to be a bit more protective of the rest of us, knowing how precious each child is and how fragile life can be. I would call it a grandmother’s protective love.