K M Walker

First Memories

I joined an OB/GYN practice in the lush green mountains of North Carolina two years out of residency. There were legendary tales about a former partner, now retired. He had a cult following of patients. With his long gray ponytail, willingness to deliver babies under water and belief that epidurals were child abuse, he inspired strong emotions.

One of the nurses told me that he believed children could initially remember their birth experience, but then forgot it by about age 3. (So I’m guessing the babies he delivered remembered screaming, lots of screaming - and cursing with an Appalachian twang.)

While I wasn’t following in his Birkenstock clad footsteps, I found myself turning over that idea of birth memory like a squirrel with a tough walnut. I spun the nut faster and more often after I had my twins (usually while covered in sour-smelling spit up, pumping for two or trying to talk to one baby while changing the other). I thought, “What if I just ask? It can’t possibly hurt - right?”

So one evening I asked my 4 year-old daughter if she remembered anything about being born. (Yeah, I know - I was running late on the birth memories deadline. But I was VERY tired, so give me a little grace.) She perked right up and said, “Oh yes, Mommy.”

I was skeptical, and assumed she was about to repeat some family story I had told her. Maybe the one about driving over the dangerously slick mountains in labor, through a rare, late March snowstorm. Or the one about the lady in the elevator on the way up to Labor and Delivery, who asked me, as I grimaced in pain every two minutes with my twin-sized belly, “Are you havin’ a baby?” (I could not come up with a socially acceptable comeback between contractions. I just let her question lay there in a puddle of my amniotic fluid.)

“What do you remember, Honey?”

“I remember finding Jordan first.”

OK, now I was really listening. My children were IVF babies, so in terms of scientific accuracy, she nailed that one. She and her brother hung out at a petri-dish pool party for six days, before I got to meet them. But maybe that was just my doctor brain filling in too many blanks.

“OK, then what?”

“Well, then we chose you, Mommy.”

Now I was shivering in the North Carolina heat. So very tentatively (because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know) I asked,

“Why?”

“Because we liked the sound of your voice.”

I will never know if any of what my daughter told me is accurate in some clinical, objective way. But in my heart - it is the definition of truth. And though I’m guessing my ponytailed predecessor might have driven me crazy as a medical partner, I am permanently grateful for the gift that he gave me by proxy. (For the record: I had an epidural with my C-section...and I’m not apologizing.)