Eldest son’s birthday an occasion to mark circle of life

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/11/2025 (336 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In October, I flew to Kingston for my eldest son Ben’s 46^th birthday. It is not only incredible how swiftly nature takes her course, but also how incredible circles can be completed within one’s lifetime.

Forty-six years ago Ben was born at the end of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Now, 46 years later, I will celebrate with him in the synagogue where he is the cantor about to sing Kol Nidre to open Yom Kippur, the last of the Jewish High Holidays which begin with the Rosh Hashanah, the New Year 10 days earlier.

On Yom Kippur reflection, absolution and reconciliation intersect — an at-one-ment promise sought within the community and with the divine. I am not devout, but I believe in spiritual presence, participate in and am astonished by the unseen, deeply feel energies and connections I neither birth nor author on my own.

Within the 46-year circle this moment signifies, I remember Ben’s birth.

On a Thursday night, just before the due date, my husband, Mendel, and I drive into Winnipeg from our home in Fisher River Cree Nation.

Labour begins intermittently on the Friday morning and, as can be labour’s wont, continues with increasing intensity until our son is born three days later, on the Monday night — at the end of Yom Kippur… and my tether. I think I win a prize for the longest labour on record, but I also think I make this up as a way to imagine some form of compensation.

During labour, Mendel and I assiduously time contractions on the Friday and Saturday. I go to the Women’s Pavilion (now known as the Women’s Hospital); I am sent home, encouraged (directed) to wait until the labour is more fully established. New to labour, I figure I am well within the range of established.

On Sunday, Mendel decides the child is not really going to be born and returns home. He is pulled off a bus on his way to a hockey game by friends on the Monday evening and makes it to the delivery with 15 (10? 5?) minutes to spare.

First-time deliveries are often strange.

First-time fathers equally so.

The next day Mendel returns to work (really?) and I am left alone. The baby is stored elsewhere in the nursery. He does not seem real to me. The labour has been long enough for me to wonder if I actually have become a mother (a strangeness paralleling Mendel’s Sunday departure the day before).

I am more interested in bargaining with the post-delivery night nurse so I can “enjoy” five cigarettes in quick succession than I am in the bundle birthed.

A devoted (and desperate) smoker, I seem not to have located what were thought to be my maternal instincts — nor grasped the miracle of birthing a healthy baby or the fact that the end of Yom Kippur, the end of its fast, can inscribe the New in the Book of Life.

When Ben is brought for an early morning feeding, he seems, at five pounds, but a tiny, wizened entity. I call Dennis (a.k.a. Doc), one of my two city friends, and invite him to visit. I tell him the baby is skinny.

I’ve been trying to prepare for comprehensive exams and am so fully immersed in that insanity, I think the baby might emerge as some kind of pencil. In fact, he is akin to four of them held together with a diaper — a stick figure.

I can say this to Doc on the phone. A nurse himself, he will understand. I also tell him that if he comes, he cannot laugh. He is to walk in and smile. I make him promise.

He arrives, beady eyed and bright — hopeful. I have arranged Ben and me so that we look something like mother and child. Suddenly, Doc is down on all fours laughing. Barely breathing, he crawls toward me, this woman fussed up in a pink bed jacket with a bundle that looks like a quotation mark.

Tears in our eyes, laughing and crying, we never get over the way Doc has met Ben. Years go by. Ben grows up to be something spectacular (a mother’s love knows this to be true), and when Doc dies — far too young — Ben sings at his funeral.

I think of this story as I watch and listen to my son during the service. Birth and death. The cycle in all its complexity Yom Kippur addresses: the interval I am living, the way in which my motherhood grew up with Ben and brings us now to this season.

Though Ben’s father is dead, his presence infuses the sanctuary. I look to Ben’s husband sitting beside me. Unexpected, reverberating, interleaved — this astonishing, full-circle and promise story, rekindled by Yom Kippur Eve, wraps gently round us. Astonishing.

arts@freepress.mb.ca