My Mother was Stillborn

In the spring one hundred years ago, my maternal grandparents met at a country fair. Charles was near fifty. Josephine was twenty. He was an immigrant farm laborer from neighboring New York state. She was a member of Six Nations from Brantford, Ontario. On August 30, 1910, they wed.

Children soon followed. Charles Junior, Beatrice, Mary, Violet, Ivy, Albert, Jack, Irene, and Frank. Labor pains for Josephine’s tenth baby (in sixteen years) started weeks earlier than expected.

My grandfather, Charles, or “Pa,” as he was called by then, went for the doctor. Josephine’s eldest daughter, 15-year-old Beatrice, tended her mother’s labor. Josephine gave birth to a girl.

“The baby is dead,” Josephine told Beatrice. “Wrap it in a blanket. Set it out back by the wood pile.”  Beatrice did as she was told.

The doctor did not arrive, but Josephine’s mother did. “Where’s the baby?” she demanded.

“Out back. It’s dead.” Beatrice said.

“Go get it!” Beatrice returned, swathed baby in arms. They unwrapped the baby and massaged the infant’s whimper into a newborn wail. That baby was my mother.

In 1926, what became of orphans who were the youngest of ten? Mom told us Aunt Mary, the second oldest sister raised her. But mom she never told us about her Indigenous heritage, the extreme poverty, or the blatant discrimination.

To this day, I don’t know how she survived.

She met dad at a dance in Dundas, Ontario. He was a Saskatchewan farm boy, conscripted to the Army and undergoing Basic Training before deployment. He went to war and when he returned six years later, they married and took the train to Saskatchewan. He thought the prairie would erase the horror of war. Siblings told mom, “You look white. You’ll blend in out west.”

She knew how to work. In the days of small family farms, she could outwork any man. She was creative, a gift from her mother, Josephine, and could sew anything. In those days, the law had finally changed so women could go inside a beer parlor. Even though women were still unwelcome, she strode in and ordered a beer. She had a driver’s license and unlike her friends, she had the confidence to commandeer anything with wheels.

The first time I heard that mom was stillborn, was at her funeral. Three generations of family and friends told fond stories of a woman whose energy had become legend.

Delia Jeanette Stansbury Carleton was eighty-three when she passed.

In her final years, her physical energy and strength remained although her mind was lost to dementia.

Maybe when you begin life behind the wood pile, you are born knowing how to Stand Tall.