BIRTHDAYS

I was born on Easter; my Dad said that made me special. My Mom said it made me handicapped. You see I was born in a Catholic hospital on Easter Sunday over 50 years ago tomorrow. According to my mother, all the hospital staff was in Church all day and she, was ignored most of the day, and when she was not ignored, she was medicated to hold the birth back as there were no nurses or doctors to attend her. She and my father played cards and smoked cigarettes while waiting. My mother was in labor 36 hours. I was born with very mild CP. I do not know if being born on Easter made me handicapped, but I feel lucky to have been born at all. You see, my parents had been married nine years, had both gone through WWII as members of the armed forces and they never had any other children. I on the other hand, gave birth to three children and raised two more. I always thought my son; my second child was special due to the circumstances of his birth. Joe’s father and I were not getting along well the month Joe was conceived so the probability of conception was very low. Let’s put it this way, Joe was almost an immaculate conception. I was not even aware of my pregnancy for four months after conception. My body behaved during this time as if I was not pregnant at all. When I finally got an inclination that I might be preggers, I thought I was at most a little over a month. You can imagine my astonishment when the gynecologist announced after his exam that I was four or five months pregnant. On the day I got that news, I started my first real professional job and my husband walked out on me. My job was working in a detention center for delinquent youth. While pregnant, Joe and I survived a riot by the inmates, an assault on me by a female inmate and some crazy folks trying to break in to the detention center in order to harm one of our inmates. In addition, my car skidded on ice and rolled onto its side into a slushy pond in the center of the interstate median, whereupon I found the then current TV advertisements for VW Bugs were inaccurate. They were not watertight. The next day, when walking across a parking lot into a store an old lady in a large Cadillac hit me and knocked me down. She apparently had no knowledge of how long her car really was. Thank God, Joe was born whole healthy and well, all nine pounds of him. You can see why I thought he must have an important purpose in life. Well, maybe he does have an important purpose, but I no longer think he will ever be President of the United States. That he is Samantha’s Daddy and a damn good one is purpose enough. Ah Birthdays. Follow the link to see who else had or has your birthday.