I was born Tuesday, January 5th, 1965. According to my mother it was around 5 o’clock am. It was at Germantown hospital that is no longer there any more. I was late. The doctor said that I should come right before Christmas.

Now this is the story told to me many times by my mother:

When my mother went into labor she did not know that she was in labor. She was getting washed up when she thought that she peed on her self. She started crying to her mother, my grandmother, that she was sorry the she made a mess in the bathroom. My grandmother had to calm my mother down to tell her that I was coming.

My mother got cleaned up and put on some maternity clothes. During her whole pregnancy she was so small that she had not worn any maternity clothes. She said that she could still were her jeans unbuttoned. She wanted to where her maternity clothes at least once.

When she got to the hospital they put her in a maternity ward. Back then it was a room with other expecting mothers in labor. Now my mother says that she did not have very bad labor pains with me. She said that it felt like menstrual cramps.

A nurse would come in every once in awhile to check on the expecting mothers. So when the nurse was not there my mother would help the expecting mother by getting them ice and wet rags, things like that. She was not feeling all that uncomfortable and she felt bad for the other expecting mothers.

Every time the nurse would catch my mother she told stay in the bed. She was even told on time that if she got up on more time that they were going to tie her to the bed. So my mother did not get out of her bed again until she had a strong urge to move her bawls. She went into the bathroom to relieve herself, when a nurse came in and heard my mother’s grunts.

The nurse started yelling stop! My mother started yelling you are not going to keep my from taking a $#!%. Some kind of way they got her on a gurney. When they checked down there the crown of my head, yup I was almost born in the toilette.

Well they sedated and prepped my mother, and her little princess was born. They asked her if she wanted to see me, and she said after I was cleaned up. After they cut the cord and cleaned me up they put me in my mother’s arms.

This was 1965 so my mother had a list of boy and girl names. She can not seem to remember what names she had for me if I was a boy. But she knew that if I was a girl she wanted me to have a boy’s nick name.  She liked that nick name Ronnie from Veronica or Rhonda, Sam from Samantha or Niki from Monique. I changed the spelling to Niqui in high school.

Now my mother was still groggy from the sedation when an attendant asked her what she was going to name me. My mother said Veronica. So the attendant asked her how was she going to spell that. So my mother started spelling Ve… Ver… Ve umm M-O-N-I-Q-U-E. That only name that she could remember how to spell right then. The attendant said that that spelled Monique. My mother yelled that she knows what that spells.

It was a good thing that all the names that she had for me were good names.