One of my earliest memories is from when I was about three years old... lying flat on my tummy on the cool, damp earth under my parents' bed, happily picking little green sprouts of weeds popping up out of the ground. As quiet and peaceful as it sounds, it didn't last long. Mother was calling my name with alarm sounding in her voice! I didn't understand until years later the cause for alarm... if she couldn't see me I might be in danger of some of the abuses that had plagued generations of girls in our family and our community.
She summoned me into the kitchen where she was kneading the dough for a large batch of bread. I got scolded for being so childish and picking weeds under the bed. "You're a big girl now, dust off your dress and help momma in the kitchen, soon you'll need to know how to make bread. Here, sit on this stool and watch how I do it".
You see, we lived in a Mennonite village in Mexico. The houses were built out of handmade clay bricks, the floors were hard-packed dirt, and there was no running water or electricity. Water had to be brought in from the well outside for cooking and washing. Our bread was baked in the wood stove that also served as our only heat source for the house.
I was the fifth child in my family, and so far the only girl. Every year a new baby came, the little boy who was born the year before me had died at only a day old. Peter was only thirteen months younger than me, and the baby after him died at birth. She was born on father's birthday. Katharina never got to take that first breath of air. I remember crying not because I understood the grief, but because I wasn't allowed to hold the new baby. Almost a year later another baby boy was born, followed the following year by another boy. Both Isaak and Henry died at birth.
When I was much older, my mother told me how she lost me one night too when I was a tiny baby. I was born prematurely in that little brick house in the coldest time of winter. Mother said she had never seen a baby so small. My aunts were so enthralled with the tiny living doll, they took a tea cup to measure how small the little face was and it fit quite nicely over my infant face. They marveled how I fit comfortably inside a shoe-box for a makeshift bed while visiting at my grandparents' house on Sunday afternoon.
A baby that small was not easy to keep warm in the cold of winter. Mother said she woke up one night thinking it was too quiet in the room. My cradle was right next to their bed and she couldn't hear me breathing! When she put her hand under the multi-color handmade baby quilt I was cold and motionless. She woke up father and yelled "our baby is dead, do something!"
While she unwrapped her tiny, lifeless baby girl to warm her little body against her chest, father went to the kitchen and stoked the fire to heat the kettle. He made some weak, sweetened Chamomile tea and brought it to mother. With a little medicine dropper they fed me drops of the warm liquid as I began to stir.
Mother always says that God kept me alive for a purpose, I wasn't supposed to die young. And she made it her mission to protect me and guide me to a better life than she had known so far.
