Zero: I am born, an entire month past my due date (bless you, mamma) at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, CA. My father is stationed with the Navy on the USS Enterprise, set to ship out for a tour of duty within a few months. My mom will tell me years later that she found out she was pregnant while my father was on a tour and stationed in Hawaii. She had tried getting a hold of him for days to tell him and when he is finally on the line she realizes he’s out, drunk, with his other Navy buddies. She screams over the phone, “Jesus, Dan! You’re going to be a father!” My mom says he sobered up instantly and returned from his tour just barely in time for me to arrive via C-section after 50 hours of labor.
One: We are still living on base, which is Treasure Island, CA. I am a very happy baby and it’s clear from videos that, while young, my parents are absolutely in love with me. My mother and father are in a dewy, happy state, being just twenty-one and twenty-two years old, respectively.
Two: One night, as my mother is making a large salad, she drops a half onion on the floor. Before she can pick it up, it is in my mouth. I will later eat her 24ct gold earrings, an anniversary gift, and my mother will podge through my diapers for a month before both earrings finally appear. She will wrap them up and return them to the store.
Three: My mother and I are living in Florida while my father is somewhere in the Middle East, on yet another tour of duty. We’re staying with my grandmother because my mom is very pregnant and just twenty-three years old. Five days after my third birthday, my grandmother brings me to a window in the nearby hospital and points to an unusually pudgy, pasty-white baby boy and says gently, “Whitney, that is your brother Danny.” I look at my grandmother as if she is crazy, surely my mother did not deliver me a brother (my parents kept the sex of their baby a surprise for delivery). I instead point to an African-American baby girl and say in a very business-like way, “No. That is the one I want.”
My brother, Danny, will later develop spinal meningitis just days after his birth. My father is somewhere overseas and has no clue that he has a son. One night, as my mom sits in a bar, she happens to meet a gentleman named Dennis who tells her he has served two decades for the Navy. He is able to get a message to my father, notifying him of the birth of his son and the current condition of Danny’s disease. Seven years later, after a serendipitous reunion of sorts, Dennis will become my stepfather.
Posted in Timeline
