Mom escorted me to my first-grade room on a blustery day in September of 1957. She introduced me to the teacher, Sister Donna. Having never attended school before, not even kindergarten, I nervously stared up at the young woman. She wore a black, floor length habit, just as two of my aunts did. This wasn’t surprising since Sister Doris and Sister Ritana were members of the same convent as my teacher. Only, her white wimple and scapular collar framed a young face, instead of an old face. The long veil on her head cascaded down her back like beautiful, black-cloth hair. I felt amazed because my teacher was so young and pretty. Sister Donna looked as young as my oldest sisters!

As time passed and the days grew colder during first grade, Sister Donna assigned numbered hooks in the closet at the back of the classroom to hang our sweaters and coats. She called it the cloakroom and directed that when we came to school wearing boots, they were to be lined up in neat rows on the floor below our coats. To my delight, the number by my hook was seven. I rejoiced, “Of course it’s number seven! What else could it be? After all, I’m the seventh child; the baby of my family!”

Mom was twenty-eight years old when she married Daddy, who was a full year older than her. They had six children between 1935 and 1945. Mom was forty-four and Daddy forty-five years old when I was born. When I tell how old my parents were when they had me, some people instantly assume that I was a menopause ‘accident’ baby.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As I grew up, Mom liked explaining to me that she was pregnant several times during the five years before I was born, but each time, she spontaneously miscarried the baby. Mom’s doctor examined her and informed her that she would never be able to carry another baby to full term. Then one day in early 1950, Mom babysat some of my young cousins. She said, “Taking care of them made me wish very much for one last baby, so I prayed, ‘Lord, please allow me to have one more baby.’”

It amuses me to imagine that I was conceived on April Fool’s Day in 1950. Once pregnant, Mom again prayed, “Lord, please let this baby stay with me!” and she felt that the Lord heard her prayer. The pregnancy was normal. I stayed with her to full term without a single sign or threat of miscarriage.

When Mom told me this story, I always felt blessed, and as though there was a big reason for my being in this world, but often wondered, “What is it that God wants me to achieve in life?”

Everyone in this world bears the fingerprints of God, but in making me, his fingerprints made me deeply aware that if what we ask for is God’s will, our prayers will be answered. Even if we ask for things that are not within his will, he blesses us in another ways.

Mom lived until she was nearly ninety-nine years old. During her last ten years of life, she needed help, so I began calling her every day and visited often to help her bathe, pay bills, fill pill boxes, do her laundry, and take her to appointments. One day when I was helping her out of my car, she mused, “I often wonder why I wanted one last child so badly. Now I know. I needed someone to take care of me in my old age.”

I didn’t appreciate her changing my birth story. Shrugging my shoulders to acknowledge her comment, I wondered, “Is that why I’m on this earth, Lord?”

In the bible, the number seven is regarded as a number representing completeness, or perfection. Although I’m the seventh living child of my family, Mom said she miscarried several babies before me. So, there could have been as many as four or five fetal brothers and sisters that didn’t stay with Mom to full term. In that case, that makes me the lucky eleventh or twelfth child.

Seven

In most cultures the number seven is regarded as a lucky number. The Hebrews felt it was a sign of completeness and perfection. Backing up this point of view was the bible story about how the Lord created our world in seven days. It’s no surprise that in ancient Jerusalem, the temple menorahs all had seven candles.

I grew up hearing about the seven wonders of the ancient world, seven seas, seven deadly sins and the seven Holy Sacraments. According to the bible, Egypt had seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. Rome was built on seven hills. We have devotional prayers to remember the seven joys and seven sorrows of the Virgin Mary.

There are seven dwarfs, and a seven-year itch that is supposed to end marriages. If you asked one hundred people to pick a number between one and ten, the majority would pick seven.

Before prefixes were added to our phone numbers, they were only seven numbers long. We can thank George Miller, a psychologist from Harvard for this. In 1956 he advised that most people can only retain seven numbers in their short-term memories. Keeping this in mind, when phone companies moved away from using long and short rings to indicate who the call was for, they issued phone numbers that were only seven digits long.