Memoir Prompt #1
#1: Was there anything unusual or unique about your birth?
The thing I hear most often from my mother about the day I was born is that she was starving because she missed both lunch and dinner. I insisted on being born at 3:56pm.
I know it was a frigid cold day, and that the day I was brought home, my father drove us through one of the worst storms of the season, 100 years after “the Great White Hurricane” with snow blowing sideways across the road and piling up on every surface it touched. When we arrived at my childhood home under many inches of snow, my Grandmother remembers my father coming back inside from shoveling every five minutes to make sure I was real - that I wasn’t a dream. 33 years later, this is and always will be my favorite part of my birth story.
I remember none of this of course, but my father had already been calling me “peanut” and, to him, that’s who I’ll always be. I was 8 pounds 8 ounces and born in 1988; years later, as an unrelated joke, a friend would begin referring to me as “Kocho” combining the shortened version of my name with the Spanish word for eight.
When I eventually turned 16, another storm would derail my one and only attempt to throw myself a birthday party. Two out of fourteen invitees would manage to make it to my house in the snow and would suffer through my one and only attempt at making cheesecake.
Every year on my birthday, I will misremember the time of my arrival to the world or fail to acknowledge it at all. I’ve rarely ever celebrated it on the actual day, and to some people this is strange, but to me it’s how it has always been. I was born to parents who prefer convenience to tradition, and it was much more convenient to bake a cake and entertain sleepovers with 13-year-old girls on a night where they didn’t have to muster the energy to go to work the next day.
According to the Zodiac calendar, I’m an Aquarius and have a tendency to be distant, act against the grain, and believe that I can fix the world’s problems. I’m not sure if these qualities would have come to me naturally if I had never read about them, or, if by knowing them I’ve been given permission to live up to them, but, as with any vague emotional identifiers, I do recognize myself in the description.
Eventually these qualities will contribute to the strange and winding road I will travel through life, sometimes doubling back on itself, sometimes careening off into the wilderness. I like to pretend to ignore pseudo-spiritual “voodoo”, but I have to admit that I like the idea that the alignment of the earth in relation to the stars around it somehow had a hand in organizing the star stuff I’m made of into the person I am. Only time will tell.
