This Little Life Of Mine - Chapter 51 - Another Little GIrl Thomas M Parsons

51. Another Little Girl

Just two months after my dad's homegoing, the other end of life was again being celebrated in our home.

In those days technology did not allow us to have a "picture" of our unborn child to post on the family refrigerator. We had no way of knowing whether we were getting a little boy or a little girl. But, somehow, I knew we would be presenting Mandy with a little sister.

It was a Wednesday night, prayer meeting night at church, when Linda told me it was time to go to the hospital. There was no Gone With the Wind playing on television as when Mandy was born. And there was no long, long labor as there had been with Mandy.

Mandy was born in November, so the weather was much nicer on the June night our second daughter was born. Yes, I was right. It was a little baby girl who came to join us on June 21, 1978.

That little girl’s birth was recorded on Super 8 sound film, recorded by a friend from church who was also a technician in the hospital, Jan Unzicker. In fact, Our baby was born in St. Margaret’s Hospital in Spring Valley, Illinois. The hospital where Mandy had been born a year and a half earlier, St. Mary’s Hospital in LaSalle, Illinois, closed shortly after her birth.

I still have the film, but I have no way of projecting it any more. Super 8 technology has long faded into the history of audio-visual equipment. It would be very expensive to transfer it to DVD. Besides, my wife would no doubt object to showing the film to anyone.

Soon Jennifer Anne Parsons joined her sister and her parents in the parsonage of the First Baptist Church of Oglesby, Illinois. The diaper in the basement was still in place, apparently, and still doing its work.

Linda was glad to be a stay-at-home Mom, and she certainly had her hands full with a one and a half year old and a baby to care for. I went off to my office at church to do my work, and she stayed home and helped Mandy and Jenny to grow and be healthy. And, then, of course, when I came home in the late afternoon, she had another baby to care for. Me.

Jenny had her days and nights mixed up for the first few weeks of her life, and that kept Linda, Mandy and me awake sometimes in the night. The crying from the girls’ room right next door to our room was sometimes nearly continuous in the wee hours of the night. But gradually, Jenny adjusted and we all were glad when she joined us in our nocturnal sleeping.

Mandy was gregarious and outgoing, but Jenny was shy and bashful. Sometimes that is characteristic of the second child, of course, because her older sister had already been everywhere Jenny would go. Mandy was the first in everything; Jenny was the follower. Jenny’s first words had been spoken by Mandy many months earlier. Jenny’s first steps were duplicates of the first steps Mandy had taken months earlier. It is difficult to be the second child when there is no third child on the scene. You are always in second place, always following the leader, always in the shadow of your older and wiser sibling.

But not for long. Jenny soon developed her own style, her own way of dealing with her older sister. When she discovered she could talk, she developed her own way of speaking, using her own accent to pronounce words her way, not the way her older sister pronounced them.

I suppose, like many heads of a household, I sometimes grumbled about the bills I had to pay on a pastor’s limited resources. Apparently I was sometimes heard to complain about the fact that people did not turn lights off when they left a room. There could only be two people in our house capable at the time of flipping a light switch, and I was one of them, so I suppose I was complaining about the imagined extravagance of my wife.

One evening when Linda switched on a light, Jenny spoke up. “My dawd has to pay for that!” she scolded.

Another time Linda was scolding one of us (it could have been me), and using a particular tone of voice that expressed her dissatisfaction with whatever was going on. “Whatchu crabbin’ bout?” came in Jenny’s particular toddler accent.

Photo: Jenny about one month old with my mother, Edna Parsons, on her front porch in Lincoln Park, Michigan, summer of 1978. Mom was 76.

To view an index of all the chapters in this autobiography, please click here.
PREVIOUS CHAPTER
NEXT CHAPTER

Raising two little girls was hard work, especially for Linda who bore the brunt of the raising while I helped the Lord run a church. Not that He needed my help. But He had called me to minister to this particular church, and that took a great deal of my time. But raising two little girls was also a lot of fun. Christmas and birthdays were especially fun times at our house. The sparkle in the eyes of a child receiving wrapped gifts brought joy to the hearts of two parents on those special days. The toys were not really important. The joy the toys brought was.

One evening Mandy, Jenny and I were playing kickball in the living room using an empty diaper box as the object of our kicking. I was trying to be gentle; after all these were two delicate little girls I was playing with. But when it came my turn to kick the box back to the girls, the corner of the box hit the floor at a certain angle that sent it rising into the air at a greater speed than I had anticipated. It hit Mandy’s upper front tooth, knocking it up into her gum a ways. A trip to the dentist ensued, and the tooth was spared.

Another time Mandy and Jenny were jumping off the couch the way their children sometimes now do. Somehow distance was miscalculated and Jenny’s temple came in contact with the corner of the coffee table that occupied a place in front of the couch. It bled some, but the injury was such that Linda thought it would be wise to take her to the emergency room. I was not certain that was necessary, and I knew it would be a challenge to our budget since our insurance was not very good. But we went.

It is the downside of living in a small town. The hospital, People’s Community Hospital in Peru, Illinois, was understaffed the night we took our injured little girl to its emergency room. A nurse looked at the wound, washed it off with a wad of cotton and said, “I don’t think it’s too bad. I am certain she’s fine.” I breathed a sigh of relief. First, Jenny was okay. Second, our budget would be okay as well.

“But,” said the nurse. I have never liked that word. It usually means something is coming that I am not going to like.

“But,” she said, “I cannot release you until I talk to the doctor on duty.” “Okay,” I said, thinking that might not be so bad. “Get him.”

“Well,” she said. There was another word that I did not like in this conversation. “I can’t. She is not here at the hospital. I’ll have to call her at her home.”

A hospital with no doctor on the premises in the emergency room? What kind of hospital has no doctor present?

So Nurse called Doctor. If Doctor had been present to examine the wound the way Nurse was, Doctor probably would have released Jenny on the spot. But Doctor could not see the wound over the telephone, so she ordered a set of x-rays to be certain there was no unseen damage done.

X-rays? Really?

So the four of us were stuck in the hospital waiting for Jenny’s turn at the X-ray machine. Apparently there were several ahead of us. The wait was significant. It was supper time and we were all getting hungry.

If Jenny had unseen damage, she certainly did not act like it. She was alert and playing with her sister. Then she, like the rest of us, got bored waiting in the small room where we had been directed to wait. Finally the nurse announced it was Jenny’s turn to get her x-ray. Linda and Jenny entered the room; Mandy and I stayed in the waiting room.

Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. Forty-five. What could be taking so long? They must have discovered something terrible to be taking so long. I began to worry. I began to fret. I began to . . .

That’s when Linda and Jenny emerged from the dark recesses of the X-ray room. “Sorry it took so long. You two must be famished.” Yes. We were. “But after they did all the X-rays, they discovered the machine was not working properly. They had to fix it. Then they did the X-rays all over again.”

And, yes, they charged the insurance company and me for both sets of X-rays. It cost me $100.00.

And Jenny? Like the nurse said, she was fine.