The Free Spirit

The Start of the Rest of My Life, 1957 (Part Two)

"I told you I want you, so what else can I do?"

When you're teased with the prospect of motherhood, you don't realise how empty you feel when the chance to become a mother is taken away from you like it was me. In the early sixties, I thought that I had lost that baby because of distaval, as the birth defects explained it all, however, I knew that it wasn't just distaval that caused that miscarriage. It was explained to me later that when my body spontaneously aborted the foetus in my womb, a part of my placenta had come away from my uterine wall, resulting in what is called a placental abruption. That explained the major blood loss that I experienced from the miscarriage, as well as the severity of what is normally a relatively harmless and natural bodily function. My husband was completely beside himself, having had no idea how to react, what to think, if I was even alive or not and so on. He told me that his mind was making up so many different scenarios in fear that I had died and left him all alone. He blamed himself, even though nothing he did caused it to happen. When I finally woke up after three days of fading in and out of consciousness, he was right by my side seated in a chair with his head resting on my bed, my left hand in his. I was on my left side facing him and I felt very drowsy and unwell, but I raised my hand weakly to rest it on his head and he lifted it and looked at me.

"Catherine..." he muttered quietly. He appeared tired, likely not having slept in a couple of days, and his eyes were sunken and surrounded by dark circles.

"Poor thing, you..." I muttered very weakly. Behind him, a middle-aged woman with dark brown curly hair and facial features similar to Don appeared, looking down at me.

"Try not to strain yourself, dear," she said in a southern drawl, so I knew she couldn't have been a nurse at that hospital in New York.

"Catherine, this is my mother," Don explained to me, sensing the confusion in my expression.

"My husband and I are going to be takin' you home with us when you're released from the hospital," said Don's mother to me, and I looked at my husband.

"You're sending me away?" I asked him rather weakly.

"Honey, you been out for three days now. You ain't well and you need to rest. Mama's gonna take you home and take care o' you," Don explained to me.

"What even happened to me?" I asked.

"I'll explain it to you when your head is a little less cloudy, dear," Don's mother told me. I didn't want to leave my husband, but he had a job to do and that was to entertain and perform. And he was right; I needed to heal. My body had been put through a very traumatising experience, as pregnancies often do to women, and I needed to rest. I didn't like the idea of leaving him, though, considering our recent disagreement over what our marriage was. Part of me feared that he would find some other girl and divorce me, leaving me out on the streets with no way of getting back home to London, but part of me also knew that Don wasn't a horrible person and would never do that to me. After two more days in the hospital, I was discharged and released, and as Margaret, Don's mother, was putting my things in the taxicab outside of the hospital that would take us to the hospital, Don pulled me aside for a moment.

"Tour ends in a few weeks, so I'll be home with ya before you know it," he told me.

"I don't really want to leave you," I replied, not meeting his eyes.

"You'll be okay, Cath. Mama's gonna take care of you, she promised me she would. Go on and get some rest, I'll be with ya real soon."

"What does this mean for us?" I asked him after a moment of silence. "I mean... we stayed married because I might have possibly been pregnant... and then I was and now... now I'm not."