My mother has always told her stories perfectly. When her grandchildren were little, they would long to stay overnight at her house – in part for the nightly ritual of hot chocolate, or for the heavy European bedding that wrapped them up in a bubble of goose down until they succumbed to sleep, but mostly for the magical way she could tell a story. She would give different voices to each character, her expressions veering as wildly as the plots. She was a master of improvisation – if the small listener cried out that they wanted an enchanted kettle, for example, she would quickly introduce one – and each tale finished on a triumphant note.
But today, as she tells me the story of my birth, there are no funny voices, no extraneous details. She is matter-of-fact, deliberate, the way she is whenever she talks about the past. It goes like this … It was 1966, and my mother Mira was seven months’ pregnant. It was her fourth pregnancy, and while the others were easy, this one was not. Her feet were impossibly swollen, and she had recently become sick with a cold. She decided to ease herself into a hot bath to relieve her aches; when she got out, her waters broke. My panicked father drove her to the hospital, where it was discovered that she had a high fever. Her obstetrician was summoned and, since it was the middle of the night, he rushed in with his pyjamas on underneath his clothes. He delivered me at four in the morning, and I was so tiny and sickly that I was not even weighed, but instead whisked away to be placed in a humidicrib. When my mother recounts this to me, she simply recites a litany of facts, and her voice does not falter when the story takes a turn, when it is clear that her newborn was frighteningly unwell.
‘You were very sick. You had a complete blood transfusion, and you had something wrong with your lungs. The doctor said, “I don’t want to be optimistic. It could be that she will not make it, so don’t count on her.”’
I lean in closely, trying to establish how my mother reacted. With shock? Fear? It is hard to tell. She talks about her husband, instead. ‘Your father started to cry; he was already so emotional. I said, “Don’t worry, she’s going to make it, I know she will!”
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