Formal Entry Into The World

(Gather 'round for another tale)

On a long country road with no sidewalks, no street lights, and no towering buildings looming overhead, a small, grey, one-story house sat just barely out of view from the nearest city of Ottawa. Screams of a woman's first pregnancy coming to an end echoed off the hills, and Diello's aunt, a trained midwife, egged on the not-yet-crowning head of the infant inside, wondering why the woman wasn't dilating, and yelling at a barfly over the phone to come home right away.

Because something was wrong.

Several hours later, in the city hospital, Diello's father drunkenly stumbled through the waiting-room doors. He stopped home first to see blood on the floor, and the note from Diello's aunt, large enough so that he wouldn't miss it, directing him to the hospital with a single word. Her aunt took him to get coffee in a meager attempt to get him to sober up before he saw his newborn daughter, and explained that his wife had to be sliced open to complete the birth, or both she and the baby would die. One ovary was removed along with Diello. Her mother's second Cesarian birth would yield another daughter, a uterus, and the other ovary, ending her already doubted ability to bear any more children.

Red hair and blue eyes decorated Diello's frail head, which confused her brunette mother and sent her Métis father into a rage. Diello will not have heard for 32 years that such colours are not unusual for newborns.

Diello's father stayed out of trouble for a new personal record of seven months before the new family had to high-tail it out of the country and continue their run from the law. Her mother hid her under her feet in a little bundle of blankets as they crossed the border into Northern New York. When they were driven out of New York three years after living with Diello's Métis grandparents, who taught her her first word "chuh-tam", they traveled west to the Mile-High State, where they all assumed new names, and were run out of every major city, including both reservations, within a year.

Fleeing Colorado led Diello's family, known again by their real names, back to Northern New York in a little two-story brown house around the corner from her grandparents. Diello's father ended up serving time for stealing a cop car and driving it into the river, and her mother worked at a factory and sewed clothes and toys for her two children. She attended her first day at a bilingual school at age four, with minimal English skills, but quickly learned to be near the top of her class before she had to move again.

And again.

And again.