This Season’s Writing...

    When I was pregnant with my third son, he was heads-up into my 30th week of pregnancy.  In this country, that usually means a Cesaerean section. I prayed to my grandmothers to turn the baby.

Before I knew there were saints, I learned to pray to my grandmothers in heaven.  Dionisia and Leona. My parents wanted to name me after them, but “Dionisia Leona” was too much of a mouthful, so they shortened it to “Donna Lee.”

Lola Leona labored with my mother for three days in a Manila hospital before the doctors told Lolo Felix that he must choose between saving his wife or his fifth child.  Lolo said, “You’re asking me to choose between the bread and the oven.” The doctors prepared to sacrifice the baby.

    But Lola forbade anyone to touch her, and called for the midwife from her village.

The midwife arrived in the operating room smoking a cigar.  She felt my Lola’s belly.  She planted her feet, her two hands on the prominence of the baby’s head, and shoved upward with all her might, pushing the baby into the little space under my Lola’s ribcage.  Lola yelled.  The midwife then moved around to put her hands at the top of Lola’s belly, planted her feet, and pushed down with as much force as she had pushed up.  Lola yelled again. The baby came shooting out and began yelling too. 

    My mother weighed eleven pounds, two ounces at birth, and drank a full four-ounce bottle of formula in the delivery room.  Lola Leona was four foot ten.  My mother was her last baby.

They called my other grandmother, my Nonna, “Jenny” instead of using her proper name of Dionisia. Nonna Jenny’s distinction was in her fierce protectiveness.  She owned a pasta bat, a rolling pin about two feet long and two inches wide, that she could throw with terrible accuracy from the second-floor window of the family’s apartment.  A gang of bullies once, and only once, made the mistake of picking on my uncle under the kitchen window.  One of them got the pasta bat in his head.

I took such pride in my grandmothers that when I was about twelve, I started telling people, “My real name is Dionisia Leona, but my nickname is Donna.”  I have a cousin that calls me “Dionisia” to this day, even though she knows the truth. 

Although I like my grandmothers’ names better, my truncated name is okay. At least there are a number of composers who think so. There are at least four pop songs written for women named “Donna.” Richie Valens crooned about his ideal woman, Donna; Dion griped about a Primadonna of the same name; a band called Too Much Joy related a fevered obsession with a pantiless Donna who was Everywhere; and the soundtrack for Hair depicted Donna as a sixteen-year-old virgin who sported tattoos. Miles Davis recorded one tune that is actually called, “Donna Lee.” That one has no lyrics.

If some composer had known that I would be lying pelvis-up on a pile of every pillow in the house, from my thirty-second week of pregnancy to my thirty-seventh, or that I slept for six weeks with a flashlight in my crotch, yes, turned on, he might have written a song that was really about me.  Until now, the only ones that knew were my husband and my grandmothers.

Yes, the baby turned. He was born in the usual way. We named him Lionel Denis, because “Leonardo Dionisio” is too much of a mouthful.

A Prayer to My Grandmothers

by Donna Lee Miele

Copyright 2010 Donna Lee Miele