family of planners

I am going through the few boxes of crap from my childhood and dead relatives. I just found a transcript from taped sessions my aunt did with my grandfather on my mom’s side. He was in the Navy, submarines in World War II, so a lot of his interview is about that. But there is also stuff about the family. There is a section where he describes coming back to the room in New London, CT where my grandmother and he were staying before he shipped out – she was so shy (shocking, since she spent years before she met him singing in nightclubs – there is a rumor that my grandmother gave Doris Day her stage name, as Grandma was known as Maggie O’Day back then and supposedly knew Doris) she wouldn’t go eat in a restaurant without him so just stayed in that room and ate crackers. And he was remembering the moment he walked in and she said, "We’re going to have a baby," and he talks about how beautiful she was. It was stunning. I didn’t really know my grandfather and he was pretty much a tyrant to my mother, but he loved my grandmother for sure.

What stopped me in my tracks was this:

"All of you children were wanted. None of our children were by accident. Patrick was even planned by temperature. We even know the day she became pregnant with Patrick."

Temperature! Planned by temperature! In 1947! This is not only astonishing to me because I naively assumed that only a few people knew about ovulation charting back in the old days, but also because my mother and her brother Patrick were Irish twins, 11 months apart. To me, that screamed accident. Instead, I learn here that my poor grandmother was charting and getting knocked up on purpose when my mother was 2 months old (and she also had a 2 year old at the time). Holy Irish Family!