I like to think my father caught my mother on the basement steps, maybe as she was coming up with a clean load of laundry, on the landing to the back door where there would have been just the right ambient lighting coming through the door’s top pane.
And no kids running through or teenagers interrupting, because there would have always been kids running through and teenagers interrupting in the mid-1960s.
There were already six — four of his from two different women and another two with my mother.
By my calculations it was late July; hot as hell in Hamilton and stuffy in that bungalow with only one window unit in my parents’ room where my father kept the door closed, so it was, literally, like an icebox by nightfall.
It was always too frigid for my mother.
In the winters she’d wait for my father to leave for his third-shift job at Armco Steel, then she’d blast the heat. One comfort of winter nights was falling asleep to the struggling whistles of the steam-heat radiators in call-and-response between the second-floor bedrooms.
When it was time, when she’d missed her period and she knew it wasn’t from the usual stress of working in and outside the house or worrying about who our father might be chasing and catching, my mother came walking up Fourth Street to the house from the doctor who confirmed her suspicions of another pregnancy.
My father was on his perch — the front porch — holding court, his right leg draped over his left knee. He shook his aloft right foot furiously in a left-to-right shimmy the way he did that always reminded me of watching the cans of paint getting mixed in the machine at the hardware store.
It was his nervous tick.
He was with one of his cronies talking probably about someone else’s wife or daughter in that lascivious way some men like to talk to one another about other men’s women.
She came up the cement steps, probably in a sleeveless Oxford cloth shirt, flat, pointy-toed loafers and slim pedal pushers. Her thick black hair was brushed up and back off her neck.
It was hot.
“Well, I’m pregnant,” she told him. She may have been smiling feebly, happy at the thought her body still worked the way it was supposed to into her mid-30s when other women were long done having children.
I also think she hoped for her own girl.
“Sheeeee-ittt!” he said, breaking the word into two nasty syllables, performing now for his crony who stood there taking in our family’s business so he could take the gossip to another black man’s front porch.
I do not know what my mother expected from him; they’d already been married into the double digits when I came along so it was long enough for her to get the gist of things.
“It ain’t mine!” he finally bellowed, wrecking several sacred totems simultaneously with those three words.
He defamed my mother, a Christian, church-piano-playing woman who’d probably lost her virginity to my father; he prematurely disowned me, a child who’d soon enough look enough like him to be his twin; he registered his father fatigue in scabrous language, proving early that he was incapable of the emotional language I would need from him for the rest of my life.
She laughed loud and went on in the house.
Nine months later none of it mattered. I’d be the baby of the house, the princess, the most spoiled and looked after and looked upon.
And for a brief and wonderful while I was a daddy’s girl.
Soon as I came April 26, not only did he change his mind about my paternity, but also he named me, as he had taken the reigns and named all his children.
I was number seven; his last, far as any of us know.
I love that story.
It says I came from first love and lust then conflict, disbelief and, finally, resolution, and that has been the cycle of my life — not necessarily in that order — lo these last 50 years.
I do wish I had trite, bright, Oprah-esque nuggets of wisdom gleaned from my first half century about “living your best life” ever, or that I could tell you how long it now takes me in the morning to get my feet and legs in gear to make that first bathroom run when my bladder is fullest but my body is least willing. (It does take more than a minute and the resulting pee is nearly orgasmic.)
However, 50, for a woman, anyway, is a different kind of time.
There is something that can barely be articulated when a woman turns 50.
The physical is easy to describe: hormones and therefore emotions shift; bones lose density; hair thins; fallopian tubes become useless; menstrual cycles begin to skip to eventual ceasing; and bodily hair sloughs nearly imperceptibly off.
It’s the other stuff — the obtuse, immeasurable stuff — that cannot generally be measure or documented when a woman reaches her 50th that intrigues and delights me.
There is a mellowing grace that falls over a 50-year-old woman.
Reaching my first half century is first and foremost the greatest irony because while I was growing up in that hot bungalow, surrounded by a gang of brothers and half brothers and writing letters to God I’d drop in the corner mailbox, I had a strange sense of morbidity for a child so young.
I never ever dreamed I’d live past my 20s. It’s an arbitrary age, but I couldn’t see my future very far and I think it’s because as a girl I possessed a hyper awareness of the cruel intentions of other people. I saw it specifically in the way other kids pimped and bullied and beat my brothers, in the ways adults lied to and swindled one another and in the general way the world spun all wrong outside the safety zone of our house, and I knew this wasn’t a world meant or made for me.
Where could I possibly land and thrive and make sense, what with all my sensitivities and my cursed blessings of seeing people for whom they really are?
Where was my place?
I think God — and thank God — intentionally assuaged all my girlhood anxieties when He put paper, pencils, pens and typewriters and computers in front of me.
It’s like I was being told to put it all down, to let it all go, to just live it out until I die.
And the next 50 shall be.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2015.