My mother's womb was a dangerous place and I always considered myself lucky to have gotten out of there alive. I'd known the story of Mom's first delivery for as long as I could remember. How a pretty blonde baby was stillborn in Mercy Hospital in 1950, emerging under the hot white hospital lights all limp and blue, with Mom's umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck.

It was Aunt Ruthie who told this story with the most zeal. How she and Aunt Lois warned Mom, only sixteen and in her seventh month of pregnancy, not to help Dad paint the new rental house he'd built in the quarter acre behind their own little clapboard bungalow. But Mom was deaf to her sisters' warnings and adamant that a little work couldn't hurt the life stirring in her womb.

"Willfulness, stubbornness, pure and simple," Aunt Ruthie said, wagging her finger in my face as if I would be the next to take up Mom's reckless ways.

Lois and Ruthie told this story repeatedly -- on hot summer evenings when they dropped by to sip lemonade on the front porch, on Thanksgivings and Christmases and Halloweens, at weddings and christenings and funerals. Told the story with the same grim cheerfulness with which they wove their other cautionary tales -- the teen-age girl with the long brown hair who was scalped when she leaned too close to the fan cooling her family's living room, the little boy who was swept away by a riptide when he wandered too far into the surf, children who had been mutilated by animals, decapitated by farm machinery, run over by cars and trucks, flattened, torn in two, all because they'd been careless, reckless, disobedient.

But if Mom had once exhibited a stubborn willfulness to proceed in the face of danger, it was not in evidence by the time these stories were told to me, stories that confirmed what I'd always believed to be Mom's central maxim -- that life was full of danger, even in utero.

My older sister, Darlene arrived a year after that first still born baby, fat and pink and healthy. Mom always said she couldn't handle more than two, so I knew I owed my life to that first child, the little blue one. But I didn't appreciate the full extent of my luck until I was nine, when Mom had her hysterectomy.

Even after looking up "hysterectomy" in Grampa's battered unabridged Webster's, I didn't know this operation had anything to do with me until Dr. Klein ambled into Mom's hospital room during visiting hours, casual and tanned, as if he were walking onto a tennis court.

"I've never seen anything like it," Dr. Klein said as he took Aunt Ruthie's hand, checked Mom's chart, and pushed the curtain aside to check on Mom's roommate, Mabel, all in one fluid motion. I'd been checking out Mom's roommate for days, her ancient, lined face a gnarled walnut, empty and vulnerable as it rested, nearly disembodied, on the pale blue hospital pillow. I studied Mabel for the same reason I peeled scabs off my knees and ran my tongue repeatedly against loose teeth. I wanted to probe the width of all the possible pains, to measure the lengths of my particular fears.

My sister Darlene, pale and tense, was standing in the corner of the room, shielding her snow blue eyes against the afternoon sunlight, chewing her fingernails. Aunt Ruthie, nervous and officious, bustled about Mom's half of the room, moving kleenex, medication, and flowers from one place to another before moving them back again. Only Dr. Klein, tall, relaxed and loose limbed, held himself still in the center of the room.

"Your uterus was riddled with thousands of tiny holes," Dr. Klein was saying nonchalantly to Mom as he wrote the scrip for another re-fill of the pain medication he kept warning her not to "get used to." Re-fills he'd supply to her until the Nixon administration collapsed and I left home.

Dr. Klein waved Mom's chart in Darlene's and my direction.

"These yours?" he asked.

Mom nodded brightening, proud of her girls, "yes, yes, they're mine."

But the good doctor didn't respond with the usual pleasantries. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in mock amazement.

"Well, I don't know how you did it. With a uterus like yours, I'm amazed these children were born at all." As he opened the door to leave the room he said, more to himself than anyone else, "really, it's almost completely impossible."

That night I looked up "uterus" and put all the pieces together. My life was a fluke.