Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [37]
We couldn’t afford to stay overnight in the hospital, so I went home five hours after having the baby. We drove back up the holler again, like I’d hardly been away. I rested for a while, then had to wash out diapers and draw water from the well, less than twenty-four hours after delivering the boy.
We called him Jack Benny—not just because Jack Benny was my favorite comedian, but because we liked the two names. He doesn’t like for people to know his middle name, but you know how Southern people like to use two names instead of one. So when I want to get him mad, I call him “Jack Benny.”
After I had that second baby, I had two miscarriages, both times after only a month or two being pregnant. Somebody told me if the baby isn’t going to be healthy, that’s how Mother Nature takes care of things. But I almost died of blood poisoning after the second miscarriage, which is not exactly the care I expected from Mother Nature. I didn’t go to the hospital after the second miscarriage because we didn’t have the money—and when they discovered I had blood poisoning, it was almost too late.
I kept on getting pregnant, though. I carried a baby almost full term and the doctors said I needed a cesarian operation. But I was still a minor and I couldn’t sign my own consent, even though I already had two babies. They needed Doo’s signature, but he was off in the woods on a logging job. They put me in the hospital for three days and kept me under medicine. They’d wake me up and say, “Mrs. Lynn, isn’t there any way we can reach your husband?”
And I’d say, “He’s in the woods.” We were back in Washington by this time. Then they’d put me back to sleep again. But finally I had the baby the regular way, and Doo called in from some logging camp and they kept teasing him. First they said it was a boy, then a girl, then a boy again. But it was a boy, and we named him Ernest Ray.
That’s when the doctors told me I’ve got RH negative blood, which meant I would have trouble having more babies. But we didn’t do anything about not getting pregnant, so eleven months after the boy, I had my second girl, with no real problems.
We didn’t name the girl until she was four years old; the nurses told Doolittle we had to give her a name before she left the hospital, and he got mad and took her home and didn’t name her Clara Marie for four years. That’s how stubborn he is. We called her “Cissy,” which is still what everybody calls her.
By that time, I was eighteen years old and had four babies. After one miscarriage, I went to the doctor to ask how to stop having babies and he said, “Honey, you should be thinking about having your first baby, not your last.” Then he gave me a diaphragm, which I used for a while—when I remembered.
Sometimes in my show I make a joke about how I stopped having babies every year: “I keep my legs crossed now instead of my fingers.” But it wasn’t funny back then. I was so ignorant, and women didn’t have what they do today. I love my kids, but I wish they had the pill when I was first married. I didn’t get to enjoy the first four kids, I had ’em so fast. I was too busy trying to feed ’em and put clothes on ’em.
That’s why I was so proud of my song, “The Pill,” that was my biggest-selling record early in 1975. I really believe in those words. It’s all about how the man keeps the woman barefoot and pregnant over the years. I think it’s great that women have a way of protecting themselves now, without worrying about the man.
You know, we recorded that song three years ago,