In the Morning, Allison

patrick
5 min readJul 29, 2022

Today is my daughter Allison’s 35th birthday. For many years, on her birthday, her mother, Penny, would force her to listen to the story of the day she was born, and for just as many years, Allison would hate having to sit through it all again. She might hate that I’m telling the story now. But mine is the definitive version.

The story kindasorta starts the day that her brother, Zachary, was born, but really only in the sense that I was not about to repeat the mistakes of my actions from that day, when I purposefully dragged my butt in getting Penny to the hospital, because we’d already made two false-start trips in the previous twenty-four hours, and my intuition (based on the nurse’s informed opinion the night before) told me not to panic. The nurse was indeed right, but I was wrong in trusting her so much.

So, sometime between two and three o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, 29 July 1987, Penny started to feel serious contractions. I didn’t hesitate. We had made arrangements with her mother, Barbara, to drive the twenty or so miles from Laingsburg, Michigan to Lansing to stay with Zachary, so we made the call to wake her up, and within the hour, we were on our way to Lansing General Hospital (now McLaren Greater Lansing Hospital) on the south side of town, eight miles and about fifteen minutes away. The set of railroad tracks on Pennsylvania Avenue was all that might be problematic, but turned out not to be.

We arrived, checked in and waited for our doctor, Joe Kozlowski to make his way to the hospital. I believe he lived in Laingsburg as well at that time, so he was a good thirty to sixty minutes away and arrived at about five o’clock. When he got there, he had his Styrofoam coffee cup in hand as he checked in with the nurses and intern(s) who had been keeping an eye on Penny’s progress. He was told she wasn’t quite ready, so he lay down on a gurney just outside Penny’s birthing room with the idea of resting his eyes — I can still see the cup of coffee in his hand as he lay there.

The time leading up to Allison’s arrival was a little different from Zachary’s. Penny felt a regular and intense discomfort in the hours leading up to Zachary’s birth, and she eventually requested Demerol, despite our original plan to go without it. Once she received the shot, however, her dilation shot up to 10 and Zachary appeared twenty minutes later. With Allison, however, once she hit 10, she pushed with each new wave, and after what was probably an hour, was exhausted. A Caesarian section looked to be a possibility because she was getting to the point of not having anything left in her with which to push.

But a little before seven o’clock, Koz, who basically was only present as an observer (Lansing General was — maybe still is — a teaching hospital), knew how close things were and encouraged Penny from the corner across the room to give it another go, and just before seven o’clock, one final push brought Allison into the world. Koz called over, “What is it?” To which Penny happily responded, “A boy.” Koz said, “Are you sure about that?”

The nurse (or intern… I don’t know what these people’s actual titles were, frankly) had wrapped and plopped the baby onto Penny’s chest so efficiently after the birth that neither she nor I had gotten a good look. Also… she looked SO MUCH like Zachary when he was born — with hair that was thick and dark — that it was easy to make that leap. We were, though, happily wrong. I think that Penny and I had guessed throughout her pregnancy that she was carrying a girl, so the appearance of a boy actually rather surprised us. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing that we had been right, I suppose.

At some point, I left the hospital to let Penny rest, so her sister Paula and I went to DeMarco’s restaurant (now the Outpost) on Pennsylvania Avenue, where I nodded off during our meal. I went home to catch a little sleep before returning later to the hospital.

For the better part of her first day, Allison would go unnamed. Eventually, we were told by a nurse that a name had to be added to the birth certificate, and Allison Kathleen was what we agreed upon.

Lansing State Journal, 2 August 1987

I had loved the name Allison since I heard it for the first time on the daytime television series (don’t @ me!) Return To Peyton Place when I was a kid… the main character was Allison MacKenzie, played by Carol Lynley. Her middle name, Kathleen, was the first name of a high school classmate who preferred being called Kathleen versus Kathy, and for some reason, the sound of that name had stuck with me.

When I told my dad over the phone what we had named her, he immediately said, “Alley Kat!” I had considered nicknames and initials for Zachary when he was born, and the possible ways that kids might tease him, but I hadn’t given much, if any, thought to Allison’s names. Alley Kat never really stuck.

Post-bath celebration of her first tooth and magic hair
With Zachary, circa 1989
With her mother’s face… Knightdale, North Carolina, circa 1990
With chickenpox, circa 1991
Fifth Grade Graduation, 10 June 1999?
Allison and Penny, 29 May 2005
With her girls, Memphis and Lily
With Penny and Josephine, 4 January 2017
With Penny and Josephine, May 2022

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patrick

Event, portrait and street photographer. Midwest boy currently residing in San Francisco. Not ‘Frisco; not San Fran — San Francisco. Vegan.