On a recent visit, I sat down with my Nan to ask about her birth stories. I hadn’t heard them before, and I was curious about how childbirth had changed over the past 60 years. During that era, childbirth was often highly medicalized, with routine hospital deliveries, minimal involvement from fathers during labor and the immediate postpartum, and practices like twilight sleep, which left many women with little to no memory of the actual birth. When I asked about her individual expierience, my Nan's response took me by surprise:
"I never gave birth!"
I blinked, confused. "Nan, you have two children—my mom and Uncle John. You gave birth! Twice."
In the following interview, my grandmother relates what she remembers of pregnancy and childbirth as an 18 year old farm wife, how things were done in her time, feeding her baby milk straight from their dairy cows, and why-- in her mind-- she felt like she never truly “gave birth.”
So Nan, we are going to talk about the birth of your first child-- the birth of Uncle John. Now you married Pop when you were 17. Did you know that you were you wanted to have a baby right away? Or is that you just kind of let things happen.
Yes, I got pregnant in my own time. We were very happy about it.
When did you find out you were pregnant with him?
I was married in June, at 17, and it was the following October, when I was 18, that was when John was born.
I went to the doctors and found I was pregnant. The doctor was an old man, old guy, you know.
What were your feelings about finding out you were pregnant? I know that when I found out I was pregnant at 19 with Lenore I was very nervous.
Happy. I was going to have a baby, just like everybody else.
Did, you know a lot of people who were having babies? How many of your people that you went to high school with were married at that point?
Well, there were a lot of other girls who had gotten married before me.
Did they get married while they were still in high school?
Yes there were lots of couples who got married in high school. I was engaged in December before I graduated and got married in June after.
Wow, Nan. My graduating class was around 700 kids and I so don't think we had anybody who was married or engaged at that point.
We were a small class, and I knew everybody. And a lot of the girls that were in my class married boys that were in your Pop's class-- he was a year older, you know. We went to thier weddings and they all came to ours.
Of all the kids you knew who were getting married, where they all having babies?
Yeah, if they were having a baby. I would go to shower. They all came to mine. I mean, it's just that what you did.
So did you all talk about your pregnancies?
Yes, Mothers didn't talk to their daughters. You learned it from other girls.
What do you remember learning from other girls?
They told me that I would love my baby! It was just a common thing that you didn't search out information. You didn't know names of anything medical that was happening to you. Doctors didn't tell you and that wasn't something I ever talked about with my friends. We didn't talk about any of that kind of stuff. Today, women have to know everything, down to the last itty-bitty-whatever-it-is. They have to know-- for what? What's that do for you?
I know it's been a really long time since you were pregnant with John. But if you can think back to that time-- What do you remember most about it?
Oh, The Doctor was always on me. I was eating too much. But I ignored it.
It was actually that we had big crop of tomatoes. We are were growing tomatoes-- lots and lots of beautiful tomatoes. I ate so many tomatoes.
I'm sure, they are delicious! John's birthdays in October, right? So you had probably a whole summer of tomotoes.
I just couldn't get enough of them. I think I gained 40lbs by eating tomatoes and the doctor said that was too much. Well I was carrying a 10lb baby-- but he didn't know that!
Could you tell me a little about John's birth?
Well, I went to the doctor that week. My mother in law went with me and she said, "There's something going on".
And they were like: "Oh, everything's fine, You can just go home".
But I'm still having a real bad lower back pain, and it just kept increasing in volume. And so she took me again, and she says, "I'm telling you, there's something wrong this girl." and they sent me home again. Well, by the third time she took me, they realized that that back pain was labor, but it wasn't pogressing. They broke my water, did all this stuff anf he just wouldn't come. I had to have an emergency C-Section.
Do you mind me asking what the emergency was?
I have no idea. Whatever. It happened to other people. I wasn't afraid of it. I knew everything was going to be fine.
Nowadays people usually awake during their C-sections. Were you awake?
Yeah, they did some kind of block. When the baby came out, they were like: " Boy, this is some big boy you got here!" And then the doctor said, "You'd have never been able to give birth to that baby". John was 10lb 7 oz, I guess that doctor was right.
So when you went to the hospital to give birth to John, your mother-in-law took you. Pop wasn't there?
No, men where not allowed in those days. The next day, after John was born, his sister brought him to the hospital-- he was too nervous to drive himself.
You were very close to Pop's sister, and she had had her first child before you had John-- just between eachother, did you talk at all about pregancy or birth?
No. I never had 100 questions. And she never told me anything about her experience. She just said "You are going to be fine," and I said "Ok."
And what was your recovey like? You had classical c-section with a very big, vertical insision.
In the hospital, I was not supposed to do anything. I was not supposed to lift anything over 10 pounds. I wasn't allowed to lift my baby because he was over 10 pounds.
But when I got home, now, I'm 18 years old, healthy, everything's gone fine. I'm hanging curtains. My mother-in-law had a fit when she saw. We had a house that was divided in two parts-- I had one side and she had the other side. I had bought nice, new curtains. They were sitting on the dining room table when I got home. I got a chair, and a ladder out and started hanging my curtains, then she came in and almost died. And I said, "Look, I'm fine". And I was. That's it. Life just goes on.
How long were you in the hospital for after John's birth?
I think five days by that time, I was climbing the walls. I just wanted out of there, so when I got out, I could do what I wanted to do. So I did.
I have always very curious, Nan. you know how mom has her vhs video tapes of all of her births? Watching my birth has always been really special. I can't actually see my birth, because of the camera angle, but I can see your face and grandmom's face, and pop was at my birth and you are all so happy. There was so much joy there, and everybody was so excited. It has always been so special for me to see how much love was there when I came into the world.
I feel like your, your experience was different even from Mom's, and mom's experience was very different from my experience and you were there the day I gave birth to Lenore too. You were waiting for us when we came home from the birth center.
Oh, it was so exciting to be there for your b irth. I had never seen that kind of birth before. And I thought it was so cool that you and Lenore came home that day! I was in the hpstal for 5 days when I had my C-section.
She was so new when you got to first meet her. I was so excited to be able to share her with you, and to have you there.
Yeah, I had a lot of visitors too-- family and high school friends who came. When I was pregnant, I had three baby showers. I was given a lot of nice stuff to get started. MY aunt had a friend who had twins, so everything she had-- she had two of them, so she woudl get one and I would get one-- really beautiful clothes--I was so pleased. We didn't have a lot of money, but I was given these beautiful clothes for my baby. And that was really nice.
I've never cloth diapered before, what was that like?
Just terrible.
Sometimes I would flush them because they were so bad. You really had to wash them, and they had special soap for it. But it still didn't get everything out. The house on the farm had a big screened in porch. I would line dry my laundry in there, and I would hang the baby's diapers so the sun would actually see them. It was probably about 10 or 12 diapers a day Oh, it was terrible.
And there's two ways you do diaper. It's the way you put it on the baby, because for the boys, you want them all padding up front and and for the girls, it's in the back. They taught us how to make them up properly in the hosptial before they sent us home.
I didn't know that. But I guess that makes sense. I've heard somewhere that Pampers are the boy diaper and Huggies are the girl diaper.
Did they teach you anything else while you were in the hospital? What were their recommendations about feeding?
Nothing.
They told you nothing? What did you end up doing to feed your baby?
I was given medicine to dry up my milk. I never, never nursed my children. Not once. Never. You were told that you were going to formula feed your baby and that's I did. Fine.
Do you know anybody who chose to nurse thier baby?
No.
And John ate.
I'm sure he did!
And first couple of nights he was home, he was getting up, you know, because he was hungry-- he was big and hungry. And my mother-in-law said, "we're gonna put some stuff in the bottle". So we put cereal in and that first night, he slept all night, and then every night after.
And then I stopped using formula and started using the milk from our dairy cows. We would go out, milk them, and I would boil it and put it into the bottles.
So you were feeding John straight Cow's milk?
Yeah, right from the cow!
Cream on top!
Yeah, after they would milk them, they would have to shake the can. There is a lot of butterfat in that milk. He did great on it.
When we sold the cows and had to get milk from the grocery store, and out of the refrigerator-- it tasted like skim milk to me. Give me a break. That's not milk!
When we moved away from the farm. I used cans of evoporated milk. There were people we could have gotten farm fresh milk from, and we tried to do it, but I didn't trust where it was coming from.
The milk from cows in our barn, I trusted.
I'm sure Pop was taking real good care of them.
Yes, and you have to watch those udders and get everything nice and clean.
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