“Gee Robyn, you sure spend a lot of money on therapy…”
Today… is my birthday.
Now, before you get all giddy and start your ‘whoop-whoop!’ing, I’d like to take this moment to honour my mother. Each year on my birthday, she revels in telling me all about my birth, and how horrendous it was.
First of all, of my two older brothers and I, I was the one that put my mother through her longest labour. She went to the hospital at about 3am on May 15th, and endured labour like a champ for an entire… three hours. Can you believe it? I mean, really – three hours! How did she ever get through it?!
I do enjoy teasing my mother about this because really, every single birth story I have ever heard relates labour being in the 15 – 60 hour (I’m not kidding am I, Caieta?) range. My mother enjoys then emphatically countering with, “I had your brother after only TWO CONTRACTIONS!”
Yah, yah… whatever mom. Now you’re just making stuff up.
Then she likes to tell me that when I was born, she thought she “had given birth to a slug”. Here, she likes to refer to the miracle of my entry into this world as “gross”, “disgusting”, and “horrible”. This was because I was born ‘In the Caul’. That means that the amniotic sac was still intact as mom squished my skull toward the light of day. (It’s a good thing that the movie “Alien” hadn’t come out yet, or that would have been one panicked delivery room.)
And now, I get to the best part of my birth story…
Y’see, I have a lot of little ‘beauty marks’ on my skin. A lot of people have them (in fact, my friend Eran and I have identical ones on our left feet!), and they don’t bother me at all. Well… they shouldn’t bother me, anyway. But they totally do bother me, thanks to my GENIUS mother who found the absolute best way to warp and humiliate me at the same time.
As a young, impressionable child, I innocently asked my mom about my beauty marks one day. She looked down at her precious daughter, smiled sweetly as only a mother can, and said that I had so many beauty marks because I came out of her butt.
So yes, according to my mother, I was born a butt-slug. Apparently not my finest moment.
HOWEVER… there is one thing that my mother tells me about my birth that doesn’t actually send me over the edge: she tells me that she knew right away that I was something special. And she knew in some way that I would be a different type of person, someone who was meant for great things. (She assures me that she did not have an epidural, so it wasn’t the drugs talking or anything.) Now, she never really told me any of this until about a year ago. I grew up sound in the knowledge that I was not a precious snowflake, nor was I the only child on the planet. I was taught that I was to be nice to other people, because I was other people. Sure, I was individual, but that didn’t mean I had the right to pronounce that I was better than someone else.
Since I was a kid, I have felt that I was meant for something big. Something extraordinary. Something important. I’d be happy, I’d be content, and I would be so because I capitalize on whatever it is that’s inside me. My heart, my mind, my passion… maybe my drive, my knowledge, or my talent…
I have instinctively known that somehow, someway, I’d be living a life where I knew that all my dreams could come true if only I asked them to.
…and today, on my 34th birthday, when I stopped to think about it, I remembered that I was born at 6:49 in the morning.
I’d already won the lotto before I took my first breath.
Thanks, mom.
You may now commence your ‘Whoop-Whoop!’ing.
5.15.2010
Whoop! Whoop!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY identical mole twin!!!
5.18.2010
You have an awesome mum and for coming out only after 3 hours – amniotic sac intact or not – you were a very cooperative baby and that make you pretty much as awesome too.
Now you are spending your money and time – precious resources for possibly many priceless brunk daking sessions – braving your sanity against the adversaries of the unknown – to fly or take a bus across Africa – to embark on a climb possibly to torture the friendly muscles who have been hanging out with you for the last 34 years of your life, rain or shine, for the people you love and care about and for their causes in which you are wildly passionate about.
Now, I think your mum is a visionary. I would call that child a really special child.
5.18.2010
You should be the one writing the blog, missy! Thank you… xo
5.19.2010
No no no. You should be the one writing this blog because YOU are climbing that mountain. YOU are the inspirational one. YOU are the one with good Grammar. I am the occasional-nonsensical-grammatically-challenged-commentor. That role fits me. 😉