When the “Choice” was the Bishop’s
“The bishop says I can’t have a hysterectomy. He says it’s birth control, and that it’s not allowed,” Mom was sitting at the head of the kitchen table, where she spent most afternoons, peeling potatoes and carrots, preparing dinner. She stared at the letter in disbelief, then looked at me, worry on her face. It was an awkward moment.
I didn’t know what to say. I was thirteen. I remembered six of her previous pregnancies, I don’t think I remembered the brief times when she wasn’t pregnant. During her pregnancies, she had hardly missed a beat in her busy schedule, but this is the first one I remember her being so tired and so ambivalent, and I think I detected she was a little scared. It made me sad and scared for her.
Mom hadn’t planned a fourteenth pregnancy. But then, no one was quite sure how many pregnancies Mom had planned. Some of us thought maybe the first four, and after that, it was just a series of failed rhythm method attempts. Whenever asked why she had so many children, she would simply respond, “Which one would you like to send back?” It wasn’t the enthusiastic, “Because I love being a mom” response we had hoped for.
Mom did get into the mom thing, though, dutifully completing baby books, and teaching language skills, nursery rhymes, and motor skills. She loved dressing her children for Sunday Mass and parading them into the pew at church, lining them up in their Sunday best for everyone to admire. As the years passed, I think rather than being the woman for whom the rhythm method consistently failed, she was determined to be distinguished as the woman in town with the most children. In a primarily Catholic small town, this was a potential path to sainthood.
Childbirth for Mom wasn’t always easy and wasn’t always successful. Two of her full-term babies were stillborn. Dr. Phillips had told her not to have any more babies after the most recent one died. They gave her several pints of blood to keep her alive, and although I was only seven years old at the time, I remember how pale and weak she was when she came home. The doc was worried that after 11 babies, her body wasn’t going to be able to produce anymore. She ignored him and had two more who were strong and healthy, proving the doctor wrong. And yet, Mom now had a sense that maybe, just maybe, the doctor was right. She had 11 living children, and maybe it was time to stop.
Mom never saw the doctor until after she was pregnant, and this time Dr. Phillips laid down the law and said, “No more.” He would not be responsible for what happens. If they were able to keep the baby alive until term, her uterus had to go. So, being the observant Catholic-married woman that she was, she wrote to the bishop for permission to stop. She asked for permission to let Dr. Phillips remove her uterus after this baby was born.
A few weeks after the letter, Mom and Dr. Phillips met at the hospital one more time, for a scheduled C-section only, no hysterectomy. The baby was fine, Mom was fine, as C-sections go, but something happened that changed everything. Mom came home without her uterus.
The way Mom told it to me, Dr. Phillips said he had no choice. He couldn’t sew it back up. It fell apart like tissue paper in his hands. He scooped it out and threw it away. He said she and the baby were very lucky it had not happened earlier. And with that action by the doctor, not Mom, not the bishop, it was all over. The baby-making machine was out of business.
When Mom returned home with her new latest, and last baby, and introduced her to the rest of us, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Colleen was the fourteenth, the last of the Barrett kids. Her arrival was the end of six months of nervous fear and uncertainty regarding our collective future as a family.
But Mom wasn’t quite right from the time she returned. She wasn’t quite right for a very long time. Perhaps it was the loss of blood, a hormone imbalance, or postpartum depression, or maybe it was grief at the end of a period in her life where she produced a new baby nearly every year. Or maybe it was because her mother told her she was going to hell. After all, she let the doctor take her uterus. Whatever the reason, she was not herself. Instead of being the bustling, high-energy, let’s get it done general of an army of children, she was lying in her bed late into the morning and unable to get up for the nightly feedings of the new little one. She was sad, despondent, and tired. My father, thinking the problem was her sense of loss of her fertility, tried to reassure her of his continued love and respect, telling her, “You’re not a baby-making machine!”
By the time I went off to college, Mom had completely recovered and resumed her mom duties full-time. When Colleen was old enough to go to school, Mom found time to write articles for the local paper and work outside the home. A new chapter in her life unfolded as she closed the chapter on her baby-making days for good. She became the president of the PTA and the Altar and Rosary Society. She wrote letters to the local paper that were published under her by-line. She was happy and content, she had time for herself, and we are forever grateful to Dr. Philips for keeping her alive until she could see that, although we are indebted to her for having so many of us, she is more, much more, than a baby-making machine.
