I remember what I was doing 21 years ago, right now. I was in the hospital. I had had a baby. They had broken my water the day before. Jimmy went home twice to milk while he left me in the hospital in labor. I had told him to bring my rosary back with him. He told me he couldn’t find it so he brought me a blue plastic rosary that Jay was using in school to learn the rosary. I threw it at Jimmy. When we left labor and delivery with our new daughter we left that rosary in the tray table. We had to go back and get it. They had saved it for us like it was expensive jewels. They didn’t know. It was a Baptist hospital after all.
I went completely through labor with Katie. I had gotten to 10 cm and they told me to push. It didn’t take that long to realize she was not going to come out the easy way. I was insistent. I was not having a c-section. That changed though when the doctor told me she wasn’t coming out. You see, Katie ended up having the Elder head. It’s a thing. Anyway, they told me to quit pushing and they would prep me for surgery. I told them it felt better to push. So I did, until the doctor came in and yelled at the nurses for letting me do that. I hated that they got in trouble but it really did feel better. The next day my calf muscles hurt like crazy and I realized that was from doing all of that pushing.
My baby girl was born on Derby Day. I thought I would have her in April. My due date was May 5th. If I had had her any day that first week of May then her birthday would fall on Derby Day occasionally. I didn’t want to have a baby on Derby Day. That was my day.
I was raised in Louisville. Any Louisvillian will tell you that nothing else happens the first week of May. Nothing. Louisville celebrates Derby for three weeks. When I lived there the celebration would start two weeks before Derby but they have since added events like Thunder Over Louisville, so now it’s three weeks. But Derby week is a festival all to itself. There’s the Pegasus Parade and the Great Steamboat Race and Chow Wagons and something every day. There is not time for a birthday party.
Fortunately, I came to realize that I was only one of a very few in western Kentucky who even knew what the Kentucky Derby was. I was one of the few who had a Derby party. So, no one seemed to have a problem that I had a Derby birthday party every year. There might have been some parents of my daughter’s friends who had an issue that I was drinking mint juleps at a child’s birthday party. I personally think that added to the fun, especially the year that we had the piñata that we could not get to burst. I might have been a little too happy to beat that thing to smithereens.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget that first Derby Day of Katie’s life. We made phone calls in the middle of the night and my family got right in the car and left the Derby City to come and meet our precious girl. I kept telling the nurses to take me off of the morphine because I needed to drink mint juleps. I was serious. They thought I was so funny.
And then on her 17th birthday, another Derby Day, she and I went to the track, with the millions of other people and celebrated her birthday. She might have had a mint julep, which I gladly finished. She might have had a KY Oaks Lily which she liked quite a bit more. We might have walked around the infield and let her experience the day as it was meant to be. She might have been picked up by some guy until I informed him that I was her mother, and she was underage. I’m not sure if she preferred that day to one at the farm, surrounded by her friends and family. I will say thought it was an experience.
So, here’s to you, Katharine Ruth Pierce Elder, the one who made me a winner on Derby Day! Salute!