I am not my mother.

My mother was the youngest of her family, and the only girl. Her birth was celebrated as a family miracle, although if a miracle there was, it was that she survived and that my grandmother survived. My mother was born alive and whole, which had not been the case of the girl born before her, the sister she never knew, little Martha, whose overweight baby body had to be dismantled at delivery. Martha was overweight in vitro, a gain due to my rather voluptuous grandmother’s sudden diabetes. It was the 1930s in France. My grandmother had brought to life two healthy sons, at home; without any doctor’s help but the local midwife called in time to cut the umbilical cord. How could she have ever imagined that her third pregnancy would be different and would end up in a spectacular messy birth, blood everywhere, and a dead-born baby looking like a broken wooden puppet? It was the 1930s in France, with no preventive healthcare or regular check-ups, no pregnancy’s medical follow-thru, not even the idea that one could develop diabetes while pregnant, and eventually remain diabetic after that.

My mother’s birth was the allied miracle of medicine and prayer. Prayers that my grandmother recited at the foot of Notre Dame De La Grave in the hope of becoming pregnant again, even though she knew it was a risk because of her now fully settled diabetes. Prayers pledging that should she fall pregnant again, the child would bear the Virgin’s name and would wear only white and blue, the Virgin’s colors, for the first three years of her or his life. Surrendering to the family’s advice, my grandparents consulted before and during the pregnancy, paying hard money for the miracle birth. My grandmother was the first woman in her family to deliver a baby in a modern maternity ward, in as much as a 1939 maternity ward was a novelty, rather a privilege that only the really wealthy could afford.

On July 22, 1939, my mother was born and dutifully called Marie, and from then on ruled as a Queen on the hearts of her father, her mother and her two elder brothers. The World was preparing for World War 2.

My birth was no miracle, but an accident; of the kind that had young women disappear for a while, at an elderly relative’s as the story usually went, to deliver the fruit of a scandalous relationship. To my mother’s defense, she resisted all calls, rational and irrational, all advices, grounded or not, to avoid scandal. By the time she fell into temptation and lust, she was already a pediatric nurse, working in the French West Indies. Was it her own birth that somehow influenced her choice of a job? I will never know. She flaunted her growing belly without complex, turned a deaf ear to those who told her they knew a woman who could help her out, “une faiseuse d’anges” as they were called in France, and did not reply when well-intentioned family members suggested she deliver and put to adoption the “poor bastard” she was carrying. It was 1962, in France: abortion was illegal and would remain so until 1975; a child born out-of-wedlock was a disgrace on the family’s name and the mother bound to be considered  a slut, even if an educated and financially independent one like my mother. Her brothers suggested they would adopt and raise me, as long as she stopped bringing shame and dishonor to the family, in the way she frolicked with a yet-to-be-divorced Italian-born entrepreneur in the French West Indies with a few children –legitimate and illegitimate- of his own already.

Was the fact that she needed a C-section retaliation from Heaven above for her sins? I was 13 days late, unwilling to show my face to an unwelcoming world. I was forced into being born, extracted from my mother’s comfortable womb with the help of a surgical knife.

It was October 27, 1962. The world was dreading World War 3, a face-off opposing the Soviets and the Americans, just a few hundred miles North of the French West Indies.