Okay so technically not a person I saw today. It’s a name I saw today. I was working on genealogy and it’s only when I spin any kind of story that these people become remotely real. This is about the daughter of my great great (etc) grandmother – from her 2nd family after my great great (etc) grandfather’s father died.

I’m alive only because people died. Well loved mothers and fathers, wives and husbands. Dead. In the ground. Cold and gone. So that I may be warm and alive and writing to you.

I am the 21st child in my family. Yes, you read that correctly – Twenty. First. I have 20 siblings – some who were cold and gone long before I was born. I have a sister just about old enough to be my grandmother.

I hope you want to know about me first – before we get to the cold and gone people. I am nine years old – I will be ten in just two months. I hate sewing, I hate cooking – especially the feeling of cold, raw meat against my hands, I hate cleaning. I like school and my books. I like to walk on the paths under the trees. My favorite flowers are lilacs. My family has raised me to be Methodist, but I’m not sure that I am. Sometimes I believe I see God winking at me in the sun reflecting off the lake behind our house.

I’m an okay looking child. In the summer my cheeks are usually bright red because I get hot too easily. My hair frizzes around my forehead like a fuzzy little halo. I love fresh, new and pretty dresses. Not that I have ever owned a brand new dress. I’m the 21st remember? Someday I will work hard and earn some money and buy my own pretty dress. One that no one else has worn, that doesn’t have a faint ring of sweat under the arm that is worn down thinner than the rest of the fabric. Someday.

Oh. I forgot to tell you. My name is Kate. I forget things like that sometimes. Manners and whatever. So, Hello. My name is Kate.

My Da’ is Scottish. He was 68 years old when I was born. He’s almost 79 now. An old man – older than most men in the town. He was married for the first time before my mom was even born. Well almost. I shouldn’t exaggerate. His wife Mattie had 10 children before her parts gave up and died, taking her with them. That’s what I heard said once when no one knew I was around to listen.

My Ma’m was 15 when she married “her Bobby”. So when I say I have sisters who could be my grandmas, I’m not telling a story. It’s true. Or could be true. Ma’m had four children and then “her Bobby” died. Seven weeks later she had her fifth child. Thirty-five days after that she married my Da’.

She was twenty-six. He was fifty-five. Without Mattie and Bobby cold and gone, they never would have gotten married and I never would have been here to tell you about it all.

I’d like to stay and tell you more. But I have to go. I think they must be done putting Ma’m in her best dress. The new one she’d just finished last week. Out of fresh new fabric with nothing worn out of it. Ma’m in her new best dress is going into a box to go in the ground to be cold and gone like the others. She made me warm and alive, but now all I feel is cold and gone myself.

My most embarrassing moment . . . I had to think on it  . . . I’m so prone to the awkward that I miss the embarrassing. I thought about the time I bled through my white shorts in the Walmarts and my mom made me walk around with her purse covering my ass . . . The time I put my lunch ticket in my awesome Kangaroo shoes and then couldn’t get it out . . . but these moments were so far in the past that they don’t really make me feel all squirmy anymore.

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Then I realized it.

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The room was dark – my body had been so constantly pulsing in pain that the change to pushing was an awesome relief. The midwife was at my feet, I was curled up the waist with my head pressed into Scout’s chest, his arms around me, my chin tucked to my chest. I pushed with the contraction and out it came. The first blissfully easy bowel movement in the last 24 weeks. I was sure it wasn’t a petite little leftover, nay, this was a good 8 inch, firm yet soft piece of shit I had just pushed out IN FRONT OF MY HUSBAND.

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(Husband and I had, up to that point, a digestive tract disclosing free relationship – farts, poop, dutch ovens were NOT a feature of what we shared with each other. One of the best things about this man was that he would throw toilet paper in the toilet to muffle the sound of PEE. Love that.)

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I kept my head down and my eyes closed, pretending this had not actually happened. I assumed the poo was cleared away by the time the midwife told me roll to my side. I paused, she didn’t move. “Uh, could you, uh . . .” (oh please I don’t want to say it out loud.) Then I felt the gauze pad reach up and pinch the remaining poo off my butt.

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Where it was clinging to my hemorrhoid.

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I’ve heard that the whole pooping on the table thing happens in delivery. I’ve also heard that by that point you don’t even care. Bull. I totally gave a shit about giving a shit on the table.