"For The Way You Live"

I was three years old the day Go-Go left me inside Marshall Fields. Well, she didn’t exactly leave me. She passed out and forgot to tell the paramedics that I was with her. I was happily playing underneath a rack of women’s clothing. The circular shape of the rack and the way the clothes hung fashioned a perfect fort for me. I was fascinated by the shapes and colors of the clothing and was used to busying myself so I wasn’t a burden to Go-Go.

The Marshall Field’s was in Milwaukee where we were visiting my Aunt Marian. It was hot, very hot – or that’s the story Go-Go liked to tell to explain why she passed out. I now understand she had to tell a story because she didn’t want anyone to know she was pregnant.

I must have fallen asleep under the clothes rack. I didn’t know anything was wrong until I heard the intercom, “If there is a child by the name of Diane Kathryn Haas, please report to a sales clerk immediately.” Go-Go remembered I was still in the store and arranged to have Aunt Marian rescue me. It took forever for her to free me from the manager’s office in the back of the store. The clothing fort had been a lot more fun.

It was 35 years later when Go-Go confessed to me, in a haze of alcohol, that she had tried to abort me. She described the whole event in detail, from how her sister, Marian, found a doctor in another city, to the trip they took, and the consent forms in the doctors office. She said she felt horrible, she felt like a criminal, it was the worst experience of her life and she’d never forget it. She told Marian she couldn’t go through with it and we left the clinic. She vowed I would be her last child.

So that hot autumn day in Marshall Fields, when her seventh pregnancy was confirmed, she was convinced she would go through with the abortion this time.
It wasn’t just that she did not want any more children. She was planning to start fresh, and leave her husband to be with her boyfriend Roger. A new infant, even if it was Roger’s child, complicated things. She made the doctors’ appointment and a second time did not have the stomach for it. Peter was born the following June.

The stories she told me that night included that she was not certain who my father was when I was born. And it drove her crazy. It was 1959, she was raised a Catholic, thought herself as a good mother, a devoted wife and had ideas about women who had affairs. What I realized was I had been a walking symbol of her infidelity and she hated that.