Shot Heard ‘Round the World
April 20, 2020
Thankfully my birthday is April 19 and not the 20th so I don’t have to share my birthday with Adolf Hitler. Some years I have to share it with the resurrection of Jesus, but rarely, since it’s not often that April 19 falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. But occasionally we can celebrate Jesus’ emerging from the tomb and my emerging from the womb on the same day. The two JCs.
Truthfully, enough awful events have left April 19 pretty beat up: the Waco cult raid, the Oklahoma City bombing…I won’t go on. Before all that nihilistic nonsense, April 19 was celebrated as Patriot’s Day, the day the Revolutionary War began at the battle of Lexington and Concord, where the shot was fired that was “heard ‘round the world.” So April 19 was sort of the birthday of the beginning of this American experiment.
I was very much a wanted child. My brother wanted a sibling in the worst way (he and Mama butted heads early on) and, expecting a brother, bless his heart, had named me after two books in the New Testament: Timothy Mark. Timothy Mark Cunningham. Of course, in those days, no one ever knew whether they were having a girl or a boy.
Mama had had two miscarriages between my brother Walker, who was eight, and this pregnancy, and since Mama was coming up on 39, everyone was hoping I would be a keeper. Mama was never the calmest person in normal circumstances, much less as she was headed into labor, so I can’t even imagine the car ride from Blackstone to the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.
Husbands weren’t part of the action back then, as anyone who watched I Love Lucy will remember, at least past the insemination stage, so Daddy sat in the waiting room. Once in the room, Mama found out that instead of her obstetrician, Dr. Winn, some other guy, a Dr. Ware, was there, and she was not happy. Dr. Ware seemed to think, being a white guy who’d given birth countless times and knew a woman’s body apparently better than she knew her own, didn’t think that birth was imminent. Mama let him know that she had done this before, that he was wrong, and that he had better get Dr. Winn on the phone this minute. A nurse who was familiar with the birthing process came into the room, took one look at Mama and said, “Oh, Lord, you’re not having this baby on my hands” and rolled her away.
I arrived not long after. Daddy drove home and started writing the birth announcement cards: “One of each now.” Those were never mailed.
Walker soon recovered from whatever disappointment he may have had that I wasn’t a Timothy Mark, and wrote an essay about the birth of his little sister for his third-grade class: “On, April 19, 1775, the first shot was fired that was heard ‘round the world. On April 19, 1955, the second shot was fired that was heard around the world.” That was me. I can’t tell you the sweetness I feel when I imagine him writing that.
And that’s my birth story. So grateful for the material my family left me.
©2021 Joy Cunningham