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authorsamvanalstyne-blog · 5 years ago

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Chapter 1

Where I grew up and the circumstances that lead to my birth are, on paper as American as apple pie. The sleepy small town I called home for the first twenty years of my life could almost be ripped from the canvas of a Norman Rockwell painting. Chatham, New York, situated roughly 125 miles north of Manhattan is the definition of small-town America. Chatham has a whopping single stoplight, a handful of banks and churches, a school district with teachers that can have easily educated two or three generations in the same family before their retirement and a population just shy of 1,500. My parents were high school sweethearts, as is pretty common in our little corner of the world

Once, I asked my dad how he first approached my mom who was fifteen to his eighteen at the time. He told me the story of the day he offered her a ride home from school. It’s a small town so everyone kind of knew everyone else, plus their families were acquainted. Before my grandfathers were my grandfathers they were drinking buddies. All that being said, my dad offering my mom a ride home wasn’t weird. I’m told she accepted his offer but sat basically as far away from him as you can get in the passenger side of a car. According to my dad’s memory mom basically sat against the passenger side door – and didn’t like him initially. His persistence must’ve paid off, or irritated my mom enough to go out with him – however this was the eighties in small town America and my mom told me once that her friends suggested she break up with my dad, because he’s half black and my mom is white. Luckily, she didn’t listen.

I’ve seen countless mementos of the early years of my parent’s relationship – pictures with messages scrawled on the back that were kept in wallets, a sketchbook of my dad’s with “JR ’s Tammy” written on the front. All of which paint an almost idyllic picture of their relationship with each other before marriage and kids. Then my dad told me the story of their first Christmas together – they were having an argument and as my dad was walking up the stairs in their apartment, my mom hurled a ceramic Christmas tree shaped decoration at my dad’s head. It hit the wall behind him and broke clean in half. That was over thirty years ago and it still gets put out at Christmas time, still broken.

Despite her throwing things at his head my dad eventually asked my mom to marry him. I’ve heard her engagement ring cost him a mere $200. At this point, my parents had been together between five and six years. On July 1st 1989 they married in a church in my hometown in front of friends and family. I’m not actually sure how all their guests fit inside the church assuming everyone went to the ceremony; my dad has nine siblings and countless extended family. There’s a video of their wedding reception, and in my family’s typical fashion it looked like quite the party.

In the summer of 1992, my parents welcomed my best friend – my older brother. Based on pictures I’ve seen my brother seemed to be an easy child. Which is good, they would need that prior to me. There are lots of pictures in strawberry fields. at SeaWorld and involving orange trees, presumably from vacations to my maternal grandparents’ winter house in Florida. When my brother was a toddler my mom claims that he would point at the chandelier in the dining room of their apartment and say “Samantha” over and over. Regardless of the validity of that story, the name must’ve stuck.

I was born in October of 1995. When I picture the day of my birth I picture something worthy of a Grey’s Anatomy episode. It probably wasn’t that dramatic but in my imagination it’s a fitting scenario. I’ve seen pictures of my mother a few months prior to my birth and if I didn’t know that fetus me was present I wouldn’t even assume my mom was pregnant. She was as flat as a washboard, no baby bump at all. And barely any body fat in sight. I’ve never asked how exactly my mom knew something was wrong or that she was in labor. According to my dad’s memory he wasn’t home when this situation began; he was out at a fire. My dad was a new firefighter around the time of my birth and had just finished tending to a fire at a local business with his company; he and the rest of his company were enjoying a meal bought by the owners of the business they’d just extinguished the fire from. One of his fellow firefighters took the phone call and relayed the message that my mom was in the hospital about to have me and my dad should get there as fast as possible. My hometown is about an hour from the hospital I was born in – from what I’ve heard dad very nearly missed my birth.

Mom was at twenty-four weeks gestation, for those not great at math that’s roughly six months. The doctors had discovered the placenta, which is supposed to provide oxygen and nutrients to a fetus was detached. Something that only happens in one out of one thousand pregnancies. This meant that I was suffocating and starving from inside the womb and had to be delivered, at that moment which would make me roughly three months premature. On October 14th 1995 at approximately 9pm I was born. My name is Samantha, and I weighed two pounds at birth I was so small I could fit in the palm of a hand.

Directly following my birth doctors weren’t sure I would actually survive since it was very rare at the time for baby’s born at twenty-four weeks to survive. However, being a fighter, I made it through.

Since I was severely premature I had to stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, also known as the NICU for a few months. I did make it home in time for my first Christmas though. There are pictures of me as an infant beside a teddy bear and the teddy bear is significantly bigger than I was. My clothes were either doll clothes or handmade by my paternal grandmother.

As a direct result of my lack of oxygen at birth I was slightly developmentally delayed. This was observed by my parents when I didn’t meet milestones like sitting up, or rolling over. I have an older brother so my parent’s sort of knew what to expect from an infant. That’s why when I wasn’t meeting milestones it warranted a trip to the doctor. Although I’m not exactly sure what kind of testing is involved I do know that eventually doctors were able to diagnose me with Cerebral Palsy. Cerebral Palsy also known as CP is a neurological disability caused by trauma to the brain, in my case lack of oxygen at the time of my birth. In my circumstance, as every case of CP is unique much like a snowflake, my affected areas are the parts of my brain that deal with movement. This means, I can’t walk

@dextyradams

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