Loretta Gail Morris was born in 1957, two months premature and small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. She was carried in a cardboard shoebox and slept soundly in a dresser drawer. I imagine day and night passed in irregular hours as the ceiling lamp sun and tan papered walls opened and shut periodically above her peach-sized head. Tiny fingers reached out, curled and reflexively retracted to avoid being trapped in the sliver between light and dark.

How large her parents must have seemed, a Mount Rushmore of towering new faces, their liquor breath as familiar as her mother’s skin. How loud they must have sounded, their familiar voices no longer muffled by the womb, and then muffled again when the drawer was shut. I wonder if the dark corners and wood smell calmed her, or if she waited in infant terror for them to return.

Loretta Gail’s mother and father raised her in rural West Virginia until she was removed from their home in the early 1960’s.

Loretta Gail McGlothlin became the least-valued new sibling in a family already containing two natural sisters, Patsy and Peggy. I imagine that as the house where she became fiercely religious, a Pentecostal Southern Baptist. She developed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. In one hand she held Him like an encyclopedia to explain all that had come before and in the other He was a shield she wielded to protect her against all that was to come.

Mama became Loretta Gail Shelton when she married in 1977 when she was 20, my father 22. They met in Virginia at a church group at which my father was the only man in the entire room with blonde hair and blue eyes. They courted for some time with frequent interruptions of military service until finally, my father asked Mama to marry him. Later he informed her that he had been prepared should she have said no. A date with a redheaded woman was broken by Mama’s affirmative response.

We three children will be born at the dawn of the Reagan era to young, southern military parents. Mama will begin making babies when she is just a baby herself, and will be broken into a grown up world through her responses to her children’s lives.

Her favorite name to be called by her children will be Mama. We won’t use it. Instead I will call her Mom. As I grow older she will become Ma, which she hates because she thinks it is vulgar and disrespectful. When I get particularly feisty I will call her Mother. This is far too formal for her taste and rings patronizingly like the use of a child’s full name when they have committed a crime. I will call her Ma long after I leave home until finally, without warning and without trying, I will begin to call her Mama. By then it is too late. She will be suspicious of me, sensing that I am ready to let her go. In 2007, the summer before Mama turns 50, I will.

by Dene Shelton
San Francisco, CA