Take me, take me, take me but not my precious little Squash

Editors' note: This piece is taken from the memoir that I am writing about my ancestors. Called "Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears," it is a story of and for my family. This particular piece imagines what it was like for my great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, who was unwed and pregnant, to deliver her son, my great grandfather, Pasquale, on November 3, 1870. All we know is that he was taken from his mother shortly after his birth and raised by another woman in the village of Paola, in Cosenza, in southern Italy. Pasquale was lucky -- he survived! According to research by a Brown University historian, a whopping 93 percent of illegitimate babies born in Cosenza in 1870 perished in foundling homes where disease and malnutrition were rampant.

Oh but why? And how? How could she, my dearest friend Annunziatta, how could she betray me so, how could she do to me what she did? Rip him from my arms, my eyes pouring tears while my breasts were leaking milk. Why didn't she take my life instead of taking him away? She might just as well have slayed me with a bread knife. Because I cannot possibly go on without him, my baby, my own flesh? Dear God, how can I possibly live without part of my body? Mio dio, come posso vivere senza una parta del mio corpo?

I've been crying for days now, crying and then sleeping, because I am empty, scared, scoured out, now that he is gone. I begged for more time, just a few more moments to hold his tiny head, still bloody around his neck and ears, crying he was crying too, I begged her, please, per piacere, Nunzi, per piacere!There he lay on my bloody stomach, I pulled him up to my breasts, he rested there, crying, his arms flying to each side, his face a little wrinkled squash, his eyes slits, his black black hair standing up there like a dark brush. I lifted him to my breast and his mouth opened and he took my nipple. He suckled! And one of his hands reached for me and we held hands, his tiny fingers entwined with mine, it was something I will never forget...

Or the pain, the long, long afternoon of pain. It started in Annunziata's kitchen, I was rocking there near the fire, it being a cold November morning. Annunziata made a cup of chicken and rice soup, thin broth, but so good "good food for a mother," --buon cibo per una madre-- Annunziata said, and then she apologized because she knows, she knew all too well what was in store for me. We had made the arrangements with the priest, devil that he is! In cahoots with the municipal madmen. For me and my precious baby, this is a pact from hell! How many times I have imagined the birth, I was terrified, scared of the pain, but worse, I knew that as soon as the baby came, they would swipe it away.

But somehow that day, when the pains started, all I could think about was me and my baby surviving. The cramps below my belly started in a gentle way right after lunch, Annunziata had gone out for something and I was sweeping the stone floor, I bent over to pick up the crumbs, and there, a dagger sliced across my insides. I caught my breath at the squeeze of pain -- una stretta di dolore. It felt almost as if someone was tightening a burning rope across my gut. I held my hand beneath my swollen womb, I felt a foot, a heel or an elbow poking into my housedress.

The next pain took my breath away completely, I dropped the broom and landed in the kitchen chair, I fell forward, I tried to massage my belly, I shoved my hand into the fiercely tight wall of agony and I cried out. Now it was a steel rope that tied me up and it just got tighter and tighter. Panting, panting, I stood and leaned against the wall and waited till it passed. Finally, it subsided, I stood, shaking, and there on the floor out spilled my water. I caught myself around my bottom, as if somehow I could stop what was coming forth. Walking ever so slowly, I moved out of the kitchen. I found a shawl hanging on a peg and I wrapped it tight around my shoulders. I knew it was time. I kept walking slowly, dripping water, I entered Annunziata's bedroom and lay down. I prayed that she would return.

I tried to breathe steady, that's what she had said, to breathe steady when the pains came. But I was alone and I panicked, I felt the baby's head low in my womb, I feared that I would be alone when the baby appeared.

Wrenched with pains that came closer and closer, I felt my lunch coming up my throat. I lifted myself to my elbows and turned my head to one side and out came the soup and rice. I tried resting on my elbows but another pain was starting and it pulled me apart, squeezing my insides like a metal vise. Twisting tighter and tighter!!! I prayed out loud, I yelled as loud as I could begging that the Lord might spare me more pain.

By the time she came, I had stripped off my underclothes, and I lay with my bare legs parted on the bed.

"OH MIO CARO FILO, STAI BENE? OH MY DEAR FILO ARE YOU ALRIGHT??" Annunziata was back, she had heard me. Clearly I was not all right! Throwing her shawl aside, and rolling up her sleeves, she hurried to my side and pressed both of her hands into my own. I started to cry, and I was trying to tell her how much it hurt but she quieted me and let go of my hands and took hold of my wet and sweaty face.

"Listen to me Filo," she said, "look into my eyes: now we breathe together when the pain comes!" And of course the pain descended again a few seconds later, the pains were coming more and more quickly. She breathed with me, she slowed me down but that did nothing to ease the agony that was my womb.

Two other women from the village appeared not long after, apparently, Annunziata had gone to ask two neighbors to come help her with the birth. She put them to work boiling a kettle of water and ripping a sheet into rags.

What I went through for the next however long it was can only be described as hell itself splitting me right down the middle. When it came time, and Nunzi yelled, "Now PUSH FILO PUSH! I had the sensation that the whole wide world was splitting me apart, that the baby was a ball, a cannon ball exploding out of me!

It felt like an eternity, but later, after it was over, Annunziata and the other two, Maria and Gina, offered congratulations to me on such a quick delivery -- "un parto cosi veloce!"

"Only four hours, Filo," Nunzi said, leaning close to my head. "Only four hours for your first baby. That is a miracle!" And maybe because she said, "MY first baby," I thought for a moment, and yes, I thought, "it is MY FIRST BABY," he is mine and nobody else's. The baby was on my belly by this time and I lay both hands on his back and that's when Annuziata got it into her head to whisper in my ear: "My dear Filo, you know this baby has to go. You know that! We must take him now!"

I turned away from her and that's when I pulled him up to my breast.

And perhaps because he was nursing so enthusiastically, and night had fallen, all dark and cold, Annunziata agreed that he could stay with me through the night. He nursed and fell asleep, and nursed and fell asleep and then at one point we both fell asleep and Annunziata must have taken him from me then because the next thing I know I was waking up and the sky was a light pink. At first I couldn't think -- what had happened, where was I? And then of course I knew and sat up feeling the pain in my womb. "NUNZI BRING HIM TO ME!!!" And she did. She said not a word. She let me nurse him for a long time on each side, and I burped him, a good healthy burp, and at that, Nunzi stood. "We must not wait another moment," she said, her voice low. "He goes now!" And she whisked him, naked except for a diaper, into her arms.

And now I look down at my blouse and two wet spots are my breasts leaking milk, three days later, the spots are growing wider and wider, my nipples are waiting for a mouth that will never come back to me. I crave the little squash who grew inside me for nine months. I crave him but mio dio it is not to be.

Annunziata -- I thought she was my friend but in the end she was the one to steal the baby away from me. "But why?" I pleaded with her that day. "Ma perche?"

"Perche, Filomena, non abbiamo scelta!" (Because, Filomena, we have no choice!) Annunziata was wrapping him in a tight swaddle --la fascia -- a long white wrap of cotton that keeps the baby still. And over him she placed a jet black blanket. "Filo," she whispered to me, lifting him to her chest, "We have no choice but to hand the baby over. They know you were pregnant so there is no getting away. Where would you go? Who would help you? The church is everywhere a demon when it comes to an unmarried mother, every priest seems to have his radar!"

I lay back on the bed. Covered my head with both arms. Squeezed my eyes shut and then all of a sudden I let out a blood-curdling scream! I screamed and my shrieking filled the room.

Annunziata lifted one hand as if to strike me. And then, shaking her head, she lowered my infant, my own flesh, into my arms and I stared into his dark fathomless eyes. He was so alert, I thought, does he realize who I am, does he know he has to go? Suddenly, he too let out a blood-curdlng scream, and with that Annunziata stole him back from me and hurried out the door.

I lay there, tears pouring out wetting my pillow, I didn't know how I was going to get through another moment, let alone another day.

And here I lay, still broken in two.