Beginnings

Beginnings
     
          I was born early because my father hit my mother.  I was supposed to be a Christmas baby, born Dec. 29th like my
Aunt Ida.  Instead, I was born Oct. 29th.  I believe I came into life early to protect my mother.  I was my mother's guardian
and protector.  She was never mine. 

A few days after I was born, Mother left me at the hospital.  She was told that I could not go home because I weighed two pounds. While all the other infants were leaving with their families, I remained in the hospital. When mother went home she told the local kosher butcher, “That chicken’s bigger than my daughter.” The chicken was five pounds. I had to be the weight of that chicken before they could bring me home. 

    I spent two months in the incubator. Even though I was not at my mother’s side in the earliest days, the time that is supposed to be the most crucial for bonding, there was no question that my bond with her was strong.  There was no question how deeply I loved her.  I also knew she loved me. Years later, she told me the nurses loved me.  She said I had been the “star” of the incubators and the nurses fought over who would pick me up.  How much of that is true, how much was guilt, I’ll never know.   

    My stardom continued when I came home.  My father thought I was so special that my half-brother and half-sister were not allowed near my crib.  From the beginning, they were made to feel I was more important.  I still had stardom. 

         Although I was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, my parents moved to Brooklyn within the first year after I was born. I tell people my mother moved so I would have my Brooklyn accent.  Mother said she moved because the landlord told her she had to leave immediately.  She didn't understand why.  Later, she suspected that my father had tried to molest the landlord's daughter, a girl of ten, the same age as my half-sister.  My father had already been molesting Linda for two years by the time I was born.  My father had molested both my mother’s children from her first marriage.  I don’t know how old
Marty was when my father first molested him.  While I was growing up, Marty was in and out of institutions. 

    We moved to Brooklyn and occupied the first floor of a two-family home. It was a two story brick home.  The front window was a bay window that looked out on a large road and sidewalks with scattered trees and street lamps.  The second floor was rented by a family with a boy a year older than I and a sister about the same age as Linda.

    Brooklyn was a place of variety, of hard people and soft people, of people who struggled and still enjoyed life.  I can still see the bay windows of our living room. At night the streetlights shined shadows. My child's mind turned shadows into monsters that flickered like street lamps on the wall. Frightened, I would close my eyes and hoped to
sleep.  Shadows weren't the only monsters in my house.