It wasn’t really just the blink of an eye between Bob Miers and my wedding in September of 1966 and the birth of daughter Eva in June of 1967, but it feels like it now looking back. Life
between me and Bob was hectic and busy.
When we were first married in September of 1966, Bob and I lived with
his parents in Lafayette . Neither of us had many possessions, so we had
all the space we needed in one of the Miers’ three bedrooms. I started looking right away and found a rental for us in a big old house that had been divided in half, located across the street from
the public library in downtown Lafayette . We
were not there for very long, though because when I rented the house, the
landlady met only me. She thought I was
quiet and since I was married to someone who worked 7 day and was off 7, she
was pretty sure we could afford the rent.
She hadn’t counted on my oldest brother coming to visit me and staying
on permanently. She hadn’t thought that
Bob would have lots of friends over the whole time he was on shore or that we’d
have lots of cooking outside and loud music and just horsing around. The straw that broke the camel’s back was
when my younger brother came to visit and Bob decided he could ride his
motorcycle up over the cement porch and into the back door. That didn’t work, but the commotion was
enough to bring the landlady rushing over to find me in the kitchen doing
dishes, one brother in back folding laundry, another brother playing poker with
a friend and with Bob. She angrily told
me that I would need to find another place as soon as my month was up because I
had too many men friends over to visit and she didn’t even know which of them
was my husband. I didn’t argue. I don’t even remember her name, but I do
remember that she was a kind lady. I
just started looking for a new place to live.
Places to stay and Jobs to do and Appointments to Keep
I remembered White’s Real Estate, and Mr. White who had
rented me an apartment when I was going to USL.
Once again he had a place and rented it to me. His secretary remembered me well enough that
when mail came for me she saved it and gave me a box of makeup and a lot of
magazines and records that I had ordered and thought never came. Our second house was a real house with a yard
and a carport off Old Highway 90 almost in Scott. I found out that I was pregnant. My mother in law was a nurse, an LPN and she
knew all the doctors in Lafayette
and told me that the best one for females was Dr. Hoffpauir. I went there and he started me on birth
control when I first got married in September.
In October I didn’t have a period and Dr. Hoffpauir said not to worry but
to wait five days and start taking my pill again. In November again I didn’t have a period and
the doctor said the same thing, but he made me an appointment to come in for a
checkup. I left a urine specimen and a
few days later the doctor called to talk to me and tell me that I was not
pregnant but asked me to let him know if I didn’t have a normal period in
December. I didn’t. Back to the doctor, Hoffpauir checked me over
again and this time told me that I was going to have a baby. I asked why, since I had taken my pill
regularly, did I get pregnant and he told me that ‘birth control pills don’t
always work on everyone.” I had been
sending out job applications, so when I got back home I changed my resume to
read that I was due to have a baby in late August and added that I would accept
a job that was temporary. Can you
believe it, I got a job. Caliste
Monceaux’s tax preparation office wanted me to work there during their busy season
until April 15th. The job was
perfect! I sat typing in a back room,
never even seeing the public or having anyone see me. I had taken typing the year before at USL and
was really good at it. Fast and
accurate. I do remember though, typing
just numbers was something I had to learn.
Mrs. Manceaux told me that accuracy with the numbers was the most
important thing, so I should start slow making sure the numbers were correct
and work up my speed over time. After
tax season, I stayed on until May in order to type the quarterly business tax
reports. Bob had put in his application
to go to work on an overseas drilling rig, but no jobs came through, so he was
working offshore of Louisiana . Every other week I would drive down to a
heliport in Golden Meadow to take him to work or to bring him back home
again. Meanwhile it was starting to show
that I was pregnant. We drove a metallic
blue Mustang, a fastback so no one seeing me behind the wheel could see that I
was pregnant. It was a great car! I think he bought it with the money he’d
earned working overseas the year before.
Bob and I decided that we should
move out of Lafayette
for a shorter drive to take him to work and a chance to live in other places
and ‘see the world.’ We found a place in
Ocean Springs , Mississippi Gulf of Mexico . We
were so close we could just walk down to the water. Our landlord lived in the bottom part of the
‘big house’. He was a clock maker and
his whole house was filled with clocks ticking and whirring and bonging and
clanging. His sister, our landlady lived
in the upper part of the big house.
There was a huge cement staircase going up in the front of the house
with a porch and pillars. It was
beautiful. I spent lots of time visiting
with them when Bob was offshore. The
landlady had shingles and didn’t come out much.
The landlord fed flying squirrels and had feeding stations in the trees
in the yard. He told me that he ran an
ad in Popular Science for a DIY clock..two clocks, actually, one that went
clockwise and the other a backward clock that ran counter clockwise. When Bob came back from offshore his mother
came down to visit us. She spent a
couple of nights and let us know that she very much wished we’d move back to Lafayette so that I could
have a “proper” doctor looking after me during my pregnancy. Bob went back offshore the next week, and the
following week when he was back ashore we moved back to Lafayette .
Surprise!
Since we didn’t have a place to live, and since we had not
told anyone we were going to come back on the day that we arrived in Lafayette , Bob and I went
by to surprise his friend Dukie. Dukie
invited us to spend the night and the two guys proceeded to party. I went on to bed…and in the wee hours of the
morning my water broke. I didn’t know
that was what had happened, so I described it to Bob, who told me to tell the
doctor. I called the hospital and talked
to another doctor in the group my doctor was in, a Dr. Morgan and described
again what had happened…and the doctor told me not to worry but to just hang on
until 5 a.m. and call him back. He said
if I felt uncomfortable lying down that I could just stand up or go
walking. It never occurred to me that I
should have told him that my baby was not due for another 8 weeks. When I called back at five, Dr. Morgan asked
me how far apart were my labor pains.
Was I in labor? Bob apparently
had been watching me closely enough to know the answer to that question and
told me that I had been grimacing in pain about every ten minutes…so Dr. Morgan
told me to come in to Lafayette General Hospital when the pains were five
minutes apart….so that’s what we did. I
remember thinking that I was not going to have a baby and being irritated that
the doctor would probably just check me over and send me back home. I was wrong.
I got to the hospital at about 8 a.m. and by noon I had a baby
girl. I remember all of it. In those days the doctors kept a mother in
labor as long as possible before taking her to the delivery room. While I was in the labor room they came in
and gave me 4 pills to take and told me that the pills were to stop the labor
and they’d be back in an hour to give 3 and an hour after that two. Apparently they forgot to tell me that they
had given up on stopping the labor and that they were going to deliver the
baby. If I’d known, maybe I would have
asked for Dr. Hoffpauir to come, but I didn’t’ realize I was going to have a
baby until they took me into the delivery room…and in those days they gave a
patient gas so I was completely unconscious during the delivery. When I woke up, my mother in law was there
and Bob and I had a baby girl, but I could not see her because they had decided
I needed to be catheterized because of something to do with the anesthetic and
they told me that the baby was in an incubator.
Everyone told me that the baby was beautiful and just perfect. Bob, though, told me that he had seen her
right when she was delivered and that she was terrible looking, covered in
blood and white powder and screaming at the top of her lungs. My mother in law had gotten a pediatrician to
come and care for her, a Dr. Pavy. When
he came to see me he told me that Eva weighed 4 lbs. and 8 oz…and that was not
a bad weight for a ‘premie’. He said he
wanted her in the incubator even though she didn’t’ need oxygen and was
breathing on her own. He wanted her to
be kept away from the other babies and he wanted to control her temperature and
to gradually expose her to room temperature.
I was pretty sick for a couple of days and slept a lot. I always asked about my baby, and the nurses
would tell me stories about how she cried loud all the time and how she pushed
on the walls of her incubator to turn herself over. They said she had white blond hair and blue
eyes and that she was strong and healthy. When I started feeling better and
asking when I could see the baby they told me that I could go home at the end
of four days, but that the baby could not go home until she weighed 5 pounds at
least. On my last day in the hospital,
when they put me into a wheel chair to take me to the car to go home, I asked
to go by and see my baby. I thought she
was beautiful, but I could not hold her.
I could only look through the glass and my poor little girl was not put
with the rest of the babies …she was all alone in a different room. It was a lot for a new mother to deal with and
I was going to go home to live once again at my husband’s parents house. At home, though, I used the time to get ready
to bring a baby home, shopping and cleaning and washing. The baby was tinier than the smallest of
newborn clothes. The little tee shirts
they put on her in the hospital were too big and the diapers I got had to be
cut in half so I could fold them small enough for her little bottom.
Back to normal? What is normal?
They gave me birth certificate papers to fill out with her
name and Bob and I talked about naming her after my mother or my grandmother
and finally we decided to call her Eva …Ella Verna Anna…the initials of my
mother, my favorite aunt and my grandmother.
It was a name Bob approved of because it was easy to say, even for a
baby and it was short and she would have an easy time learning to write it later
on. Her middle name was the first two
letters of Bob’s first name “Ro” and the last two of my middle name “ne” to
spell Rone. On the birth certificate Bob
put an accent mark over top of the “o” and said it was because she was from Louisiana and the name
should be pronounced “Renee”. I don’t
think the State of Louisiana
ever put the mark onto her official name. Eva didn’t like Rone and always pronounced it
Renee. Back at home, Irene’s step mother (Mammie who'd remarried a man named Mike and lived in New Orleans) came to visit and she helped me resize my own clothes and clothes for
the baby. She brought me some lifesize doll
clothes that were the exact size I needed.
Twice a day I would go to the hospital and ‘visit’ Eva. She got out of the incubator on the 5th
day, but her bed was usually as far as possible, sometimes even in another room
away from the newborn babies because she was not newborn anymore. I still could not hold her or touch her but I
did watch how the nurses took care of her.
They sat in a rocking chair whenever they fed her, so I got a rocking
chair in my room at home so that I could do everything as much like they had
done it at the hospital as possible. Eva
was there for five weeks and had gained weight up to five pounds and 12 ounces
before I was finally able to bring her home.
Still a “premie” at home though, I watched her eyebrows come in and her
earlobes grow. I remember how odd it was
that her head was so tenuously connected to her body that she could have turned
it around backwards. I remember how
often she needed to be fed, in the beginning every two hours, and how little
she ate, the bottles I used held two ounces and sometimes she did not drink that
much before she fell asleep. I had to
send away to Evenflo, the company that made the nipples for the bottles I bought because the holes were too big…and when Eva would try to eat, the milk would
come out so fast it would run down her neck and get her clothes all wet. When she would wake up, the first thing I
would do was change her diaper, then I would hold her and sit in a rocking
chair and feed her. At first all she
seemed to do was eat and sleep and I needed to be right by her side because she
woke very often. Later she started
sleeping twice as long and drinking twice a much formula. I was glad that Irene and Homer were there,
though, because I was not used to going strong on so little sleep. Bob was there every other week, too and he
was a big help, the two of us learning how to give our tiny little girl a
bath. He sang to her a lot. He worked hard to get the baby to smile…and
she did smile at him, too. By the time she
was three months old Eva had progressed into your normal three month old
baby. When she was four months old Bob
and I moved out into an apartment off the Abbeville highway behind Brown’s Thrift City Port Arthur in Texas
and he left to ride the rig overseas to it’s first location off the coast of Nigeria
in mid October. They told me that I
would have to stay in the states for six months before I could join him, but
when I talked to the company they said if I got all my shots and my passport I
could go in December when the rig changed locations to Senegal in West Africa.
To be continued...
This part of the story of the grandfather of my grandchildren has been the hard to tell. Bob Miers would be a great grandfather today. The baby in this story, my daughter Eva, too is deceased. Part of what makes this story hard to tell is that I am the only one who knows it. Part of what makes this story hard to tell is that there are things that I don't want to remember. When Eva was born, my own father was angry and sent me a card telling me that I had barely made it nine months before giving birth. It had already been about a year since my Dad had spoken to me and he didn't speak to me again for another four years. That is part of the story that I don't really want to tell. Even though it is truth, it is far in the past and things changed over the years. Another part of the story, Bob's mother was angry at me for much of the time that her son and I were married, specifically because I was so good at finding a house so that Bob and I could move out of hers. She loved my baby and I know Eva loved her grandmother. Some things are better left unsaid and problems between kids and their inlaws are pretty much normal. My heart is broken that Eva has died, and depression takes over when I think that she isn't and won't ever be here again...and that, most of all makes this story hard for me to remember and to write down. I try whenever I can to use names and places to bring a little recognition and curiosity to the minds of the reader, who, I expect, is my granddaughter who missed out on knowing her grandfather. Now that her mother, too is gone, it is up to me. And so, when I am able I will continue with the story of going overseas when Eva was but six months old...
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