I was born on November 9, 1956, the oldest child of Carol Louise Owen Primo and Robert Julius Primo. A story I thought was true for almost forty years.
My parents were married on February 11, 1956, which, according to my mother, meant I was a honeymoon baby. Mom didn’t tell me much about my birth, probably because I never asked and/or just wasn’t much interested until it was too late. One tidbit I do remember her sharing is that she and Daddy had gone out to eat Mexican food with their dear friends, Chick and Jaye Richardson, the night I was born. Daddy took mother home before taking Chick and Jaye home. Why? Was Mom feeling bad? Did she know she was going into labor? Or was it a sudden surprise once Dad left her alone at the little house on 33rd Street in Lubbock, Texas? 2622 33rd St, a white cinderblock two bedroom, one bath house with a backward “S” on the chimney and a huge blue cedar by the front door.
The house was furnished with early American solid maple furniture selected by my father and his house-mate, “old Lee Newell,” in their bachelor days; sturdy furniture with deep upholstered cushions and heavy wood frames. The matching sofa and arm chair had bun-shaped ornamental knobs on the arms. Mother often recounted, years later while sitting in “her” chair, that she thought she might twist the knobs right off the chair while waiting for Bob to return home to take her to the hospital.
I was delivered at Methodist Hospital, as were my younger siblings and both of my daughters. I wonder what my delivery was like. Because it was 1956 I can imagine that Mom was given anesthesia and was not aware of me until sometime later. I also imagine my father in a waiting room being told, “It’s a girl” by a nurse and seeing me for the first time through the glass of the baby nursery window.
That is what I knew of my birth, real and imagined, until 1991 when my mother was dying of lung cancer at an in-patient hospice facility in Houston. Her death was not pretty. Cancer is a mean bitch. She lived longer than we expected once we were transferred to hospice. Why would she not let go? Her suffering was immense. Nurses who knew about these things, dying and suffering, told us she might be hanging on because of an “unresolved life conflict.” My sister and I thought that absurd. My Aunt Mary, one of Mother’s younger sisters, said, “Okay girls, I’m going to punt here. Your mother had a child she gave up for adoption in 1953, before she met your dad. Maybe that’s it.”
The earth shifted slightly on its axis. Time wanted to stop, but I couldn’t let it. I couldn’t take in and process the words my aunt just spoke. I knew I did not have the luxury of thinking about what this life-altering news meant just then. Through tears, my sister, Kim, and I promised our mother that we would find her child, that we would make him a part of our family, and that we would tell him all about her.
If this had been a movie, a sugar-coated made for Lifetime Television movie, Mother would have taken her final breath and passed sweetly into whatever is next. But dying of cancer is not a made-for-TV movie. She suffered for a few more days and died while I was down the hall eating a hamburger. But her dying during the few minutes I left her is another story. This story is about my birth, not about my mother’s death. This story is about how you can believe something to be true for 35 years and then suddenly learn it is not. I am not the first born child of Carol Louise Owen Primo. That place belongs to John Anthony Rafkind, my big brother. The big brother we found, and made a part of our family, and told what a wonderful mother we had. Better fodder for a movie to be sure.
