The Seventh Child

I’m not sure of the propriety of quoting other people’s published stories.  I was going to paraphrase the first few paragraphs of “From Maine to Thailand,” the memoir of Roger Parent that appears in the Number 87 volume of Echoes, but it’s written so well and so succinctly that I’m going to post it as is and hope that I’m not committing any sort of violation.

“My parents had six children and could not afford another child.  Maybe they didn’t want another child, but I don’t know that.  It was near the end of the Depression.  They had lost their savings, jobs were scarce, and birth control was an inexact science fraught with moral implications for my parents who were devout Catholics.  They tried to follow the birth control allowed by the Church: abstinence, nursing the last baby as long as possible, and having sexual intercourse only when they thought my mother was not fertile.  But nothing worked and I was born January 22, 1939, on a very cold day in Lille, a small village in northern Maine, a few hundred yards from the border with New Brunswick, Canada.

“After I was born, my parents, although not naturally superstitious, tried the birth control of an old French Acadian tale: if you named the seventh child after the grandfathers or grandmothers, this would be your last child.  I was the seventh child, and my parents, desperate not to have another, named me Jean Octave Roger.

“Unfortunately for my parents, and fortunately for my three younger sisters, this birth control didn’t work.  Years later, toward the end of her long life, my mother told me, ‘If I were young, I would not follow the Church’s ban on artificial [whatever that means] birth control.’”