There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me (5 page)

But at the time, even though she wasn’t a college graduate or an upper-class society debutante, I’m sure Dad found Mom’s charisma and humor refreshing. She was known for her energetic personality and game attitude. It appeared that she could converse with people from all walks of life and could blend into a variety of different social settings seamlessly. But he wouldn’t have known at first that she was also quite volatile and frequently prone to drama in her relationships. He was no doubt going to be confronted with his own version of the fur-coat incident if he stayed around long enough.

•   •   •

Soon Mom discovered she was pregnant. When she told my dad, he must have felt a sense of panic—and rightfully so. He wasn’t ready to be a father. He was just starting his life in business and was forced to travel a lot. He had less money than one would think, and he was still a baby himself.

Dad really did not know how to handle this. He must have told his dad, who took it upon himself to try to persuade my mother to
terminate the pregnancy. I was told my grandfather called my mother to meet with him to discuss the situation. Mom met Pop-Pop at his apartment and he sat her down to talk. He requested that mom terminate the pregnancy, explaining that having a child out of wedlock would risk my father getting kicked off the Social Register.

Mom explained that she hadn’t meant to corner my father into marrying her and would not hold him accountable for the child. Personally, I believe my mom really did want to be married to my dad but would never have purposely gotten pregnant to do so. She wanted a baby. Period. She craved unconditional love. Pop-Pop (rather hypocritically) alluded to the fact that because Mom and his son Frank came from such different social backgrounds and social status, it seemed an inappropriate coupling. Basically, it just wouldn’t look good for my dad to father a child with somebody from Newark. He discreetly slid her an envelope and asked her to take care of the “situation.”

According to my mother, she nodded in agreement, explained that she fully understood the state of affairs, took the envelope, and departed. She had no intention of getting an abortion but saw no reason not to take the cash. Instead of going to a doctor, she proceeded immediately to a favorite antique store. There she used the money in the envelope to buy a cherrywood oval coffee table whose four sides folded up with brass brackets to form a sort of connected tray. She was not surprised or angry but defiant as always and knew she wanted the baby and that was that. It’s funny—that table would become a favorite standing tool for me as I grew up. I remember teething on it and loving to repeatedly fold the sides up and down and up and down. The table saved my life and helped me to stand.

I didn’t learn the truth until recently, but Mom, after buying her new coffee table, suddenly decided to play hard to get. She stopped talking to my father entirely. She said she didn’t want anything from my dad but just wanted the baby. She refused to see or even speak to him. Mom was trying to get Dad to realize that he could not live
without her. My father, distraught by the pregnancy, and afraid for his future, he went to Mass (for the first and last time) and received communion the day he found out about the pregnancy. He was heartsick. He was evidently so in love with my mother that he sent her flowers galore and even sent my godmother, Lila, a cactus garden because she was from Arizona. As much in love with my mom as he was, my father was still not ready to get married or be a dad. He knew Mom would not terminate anything except their relationship, but he was extremely conflicted. Mom cut him off for a few months and hoped he would miss her enough to propose. She made it very clear to everyone that the baby was here to stay, and both my father and grandfather knew it.

When my mother originally told me this story, she had altered it entirely and decided to tell me that my father had left the country during this time. She claimed that when he returned and saw that she had not had an abortion, he proposed. She said that she just calmly waited for his return and enjoyed the life growing inside of her.

My mother’s version of the story has my dad going away for a few months and eventually not being able to stay separated from her. Like a comic-book detective, she loved declaring, “Your dad couldn’t stay away from me, and I knew he’d eventually come sniffin’ around again.”

Mom continued on with her altered story, adding that when Dad did return to rekindle, he was shocked to see her big belly and immediately demanded she marry him. Mom loved the dramatic addition of saying that Dad thought he’d return and she would be thin again and without child, but when he saw that she was hugely pregnant, wanted to be a family.

In her version of the story, she opened the door and he turned white as a sheet. “Jesus Christ, Teri. . . . I thought . . .” Not ever being one to be told what to do, Mom reveled in the idea that she could be so in control and shocking.

But the truth was Mom avoided him until he said he wanted to marry her. I guess she broke him down. He did love and miss her, even though he wasn’t really ready for any of this. In the end, Mom happened to be desperately in love with my father. Once he claimed he wanted to get married, she ended his solitary confinement.

•   •   •

Dad bought a small diamond solitaire engagement ring from Tiffany (that would eventually be thrown out the seventh-floor window during a fight between my parents, but that’s another story). And one day in April, Mom, dressed in a gray wool gabardine maternity dress, went with my father down to city hall. Dad had forgotten his ID at home and had to cab back to retrieve it. For years Mom made up a story that my father was so young—and looked so young compared to her—that the city-hall official was forced to ask for his ID, fearing he was underage.

Sadly, it was not until I wrote this part of the story that I realized this was another little white lie. He had forgotten to bring ID, but it had nothing to do with how young he looked. Everybody is required to have a form of ID when applying for a marriage license. Ah, over the years how implicitly I have believed even the most outrageous mini-lies that my mother has told me. I simply took these fun facts as actual fact when Mom was just envisioning the movie that she wanted to create. You tell stories over and over enough times, and in a way, they become the new reality.

When Mom spoke of this time in later years, it seemed as if she had no worries whatsoever. She was feeling great and was taking so many vitamins that they filled a shoe box. She recalled standing on a corner waiting for the light to turn green one day and her hair—which was usually thin and sparse—had become so healthy and thick that she could, for the first time in her life, feel it swaying in the wind.
She enjoyed being pregnant and said she hardly had any morning sickness at all.

•   •   •

My parents moved to an apartment on East Fiftieth Street. I have only two pictures of my mom pregnant. In one Dad is lying on the couch and Mom is standing by a window holding a glass. This was probably the only photo of Mom holding a glass that did not have alcohol in it. Mom was extremely healthy while she was pregnant and I believe drank very little if at all. In the photo she is backlit and wearing a big yellow muumuu-like dress. She is smiling.

This time for my parents seems to have been a rather uneventful one. Mom prepped for the baby and Dad was working in New York City. In the other photo, they are at a restaurant where my dad is looking lovingly at my expectant mom, who is proudly displaying her diamond. They looked like such a beautiful and contented couple.

•   •   •

On May 31, 1965, my mother and father, along with my godmother, Lila, and a date, were on their way out of the city to watch the Indy 500 on a big-screen TV. The group stopped off at a diner to grab a bite to eat before the start of the race. Mom stood up to go to the ladies’ room and suddenly her water broke. It was two months before my due date, and a wave of panic surged through my mother’s veins. The only calm one in the place was the waitress who purportedly got immediately down on the floor and began mopping up the mess with her table rag. Mom would later remark at how nonchalant the woman was and how unfazed she was by what had just happened. By the time my dad got Mom to the New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center maternity ward, she was in labor. Everybody was on high alert because of how premature I was. Mom said they gave her some
medication, and from that moment on, she had no recollection of what took place. She awoke to my father leaning over her saying, “We have a perfectly formed baby girl.”

Mom remembered thinking that Dad was a lucky bastard who always got exactly what he wanted—he had hoped for a girl and Mom had prayed for a boy. I never got to understand why my mother wanted a son over a daughter. I could speculate as to the psychology of losing her father, or having a less-than-stellar relationship with her mother, but for some reason Mom wanted a boy. She had picked out the name John and was
sure
I was going to be a boy. However, it was days before Mom got to see her perfectly formed baby girl because I had been whisked off to the nursery and placed in an incubator to be monitored. Days passed and still Mom had not laid eyes on me. She began getting suspicious as to why her baby was being kept away from her. She started experiencing late-night paranoia that it was all a lie and that there was actually no baby. She feared the baby had died and people were not telling her the truth. I would not learn until much later why Mom had such a fear of me dying. The doctors reassured her she had a healthy five-pound, three-ounce daughter who was safely tucked in her incubator, and they encouraged Mom to rest.

Mom desperately tried to sleep through the next lonely night but claimed an annoyingly squeaky door kept her awake. She summoned a nurse to request that the door be oiled so she could rest. The attending nurse looked right at my mother, with slight annoyance in her voice, and explained that the “squeaky door” was in fact Mom’s newborn baby in the nursery next door, and nothing they could do would stop it.

Mom waited in silence after the nurse departed and, with mounting desperation, hobbled off her hospital bed and snuck out of her room. She was not convinced that any of these stories about her infant were true, and with increasing hysteria, she was determined to find out the truth. She snuck into the nursery and began frantically
looking for her daughter’s name on the cribs. Her fear and confusion became fueled by the fact that the manufacturing company of all incubators and cribs at that time was called Shields and Company. She went from thinking she had no baby to seeing every single crib with her baby’s name on it. It must have been surreal.

Mom looked to the far end of the nursery and saw two cribs at the back a bit apart from the others. One crib was faced out and the other was faced to the wall. It was an unusually busy time for birthing babies and space was tight. In those days the children being placed up for adoption were put in cribs and then turned away from the glass so the birth mothers couldn’t see the babies. It was thought to make the transition less fraught for the mother. It just so happened that I was in one of the two cribs against this back wall. Standing alone and looking at two cribs—one facing out and the other facing the wall, not knowing which baby was hers and fearing that somebody had put her baby up for adoption—my mother went insane. She began screaming and rushed to read the names on the two cribs.

A nurse burst in to calm my mom and asked her what she needed.

“I want to see my baby!” she kept screaming. “I want to see my baby!”

“Calm down, miss!”

“I will not calm down until I see my baby! You have all been lying to me about squeaky doors and perfect babies and I don’t believe any of it!”

“OK, OK! Please relax. Here is your baby girl.”

The nurse reached into the crib not facing the wall and, staring only at my mother, lifted me up. My mother gasped because I was totally covered in meconium. I guess I had not been checked on in a while and had managed to cover myself in the blackish green poop that comes out of newborns. This was, in fact, a sign that I was healthy, but the nurse almost dropped me the moment she saw that she was holding a slippery little, flailing dark-green monster.

“This is the squeaking door, Mrs. Shields. I’ll clean her up and you can hold her.” From that moment on, Mom never wanted to let me out of her sight again.

•   •   •

They released us from the hospital once I gained a bit of weight. Breast-feeding didn’t seem to be popular in 1965, and I guess my mother never even considered it. I was put on Enfamil and sent home.

Evidently, Mom said that my eyes had remained closed since birth. She brought me home and waited but began to get worried because my eyes stayed shut. Well, Mom brought me back to the doctor, who said, “Oh, you want her eyes open?”

And with Mom’s nod he took his big middle finger and thumb and flicked as hard as he could on the bottom of my feet. My eyes popped right open and I let out a wail and started to cry.

“There you go.”

How rude! I had been born two months premature, so maybe I was just not ready to actually see the big world yet. You try getting out of a cozy bed two months before it’s time to get up!

My father wanted to name me after his mother but Mom preferred the name Brooke. She had seen a beautiful photo of a woman in a field, and the photographer was named Christian Brooks. She thought Brooke with an
e
instead of an
s
would be a pretty name for a girl. When the time came for me to be baptized, the priest said that because there was no saint named Brooke, I could not be christened Brooke. Mom says she immediately responded by saying: “Well, put an
a
at the end of Christ. Is that Catholic enough for ya?” I assume the name Christa also had something to do with the photographer, but her reported response to the priest made for a better tale.

So I was born Brooke Christa Shields and baptized Christa Brooke Shields. After the christening my mom and dad went to P. J. Clarke’s and placed me on the bar and toasted me. My husband and I have
done the very same thing with both our daughters. Celebrating with a beer to the baby on the bar has become a bit of a tradition. I have never been called Christa but always liked it as a middle name.