Preface

March 2013

Stories of my life. Believe it or not — then move on to the next story.

Dang it, I was warm and cozy, and now bright light, and noises! Put me back!

Yes, that’s a riff on “The Jerk” a Steve Martin movie classic. Lines that stick with me, though. And since it’s both cute, and contains a twinge of truth, I ran with it.

Anyway, I was born a very unlikely birth, from soup to nuts. ¹ Mom had a partial hysterectomy before I was even baking. Later on, I came out a little too blue for comfort, and they briefly brought in the priest. This is all stuff I’ve been told, no memories for me, but it was a hell of a way to start my life.

The version I’ve heard from my family (mostly my mother, but my father and sister too) is that I was not supposed to happen. Mom was told she’d never have kids, after the first three, and she didn’t plan on me. Then, surprise, she finds out she’s pregnant. Dad was overjoyed. Mom was less thrilled. She was 40, had already raised my four older siblings, and was looking forward to something else.

But, she had me anyway. Because mom’s eggs are hardy, let me tell you. Four years after a partial hysterectomy, she got pregnant. The doctor was not amused. He told her she was “too old” and “this was dangerous” and “you should probably not do this.” Mom, in her infinite stubbornness, did it anyway.

So, I’m born, I’m blue, the priest gets called, and I survive. Which is a recurring theme, frankly. I survive.

Growing up, I was odd in a lot of ways. (I mean, we all are, but mine had a… flavor.) I was small, I was sickly, I had strange development curves, and at some point a geneticist told me I had an “aging disorder” that, paradoxically, would not be a disorder after a certain point.

I was, in effect, aging too slowly. Not in the “Benjamin Button” way — not backwards — but delayed. It meant childhood lasted longer. It meant puberty arrived late. It meant my body and my peers were on different clocks. It meant I was always a little out of phase with the world.

I hit puberty at 21.²

Let that land. Twenty. One.

There are a thousand social and psychological implications to that sentence, and I lived most of them. This is not a medical essay. This is a memoir. A story. A record of how a person tries to be a person while the world insists there are only certain allowed templates.

So: this site. This book. This experiment.

I want to write a memoir not as a straight line, but as a tree. Life doesn’t happen in clearly delineated chapters. It happens in moments, and then later you realize those moments had roots. Or branches. Or thorns.

The plan (in my head) was a chapter tree: A preface that explains the shape of the thing, then entries — chapters — that connect. Clickable links. A “go to page” box. A forward arrow for the next chronological entry. Or the next entry in order of writing. Or both.

Because sometimes you remember something old because something new poked it. And sometimes you need to talk about now, because now is on fire.

So I intended to write whatever occurred to me, whenever it did, add the date, and move on. Not to “blog,” but to build a book out of living.

And I never found a WordPress theme that could do the shape I wanted without dragging me into a rabbit hole. So the tree stayed in my head. And this page stayed alone for ages.

But the intent didn’t go away.

So here we are.

If you want to read this as a linear memoir, you’ll be able to. If you want to jump around, you’ll be able to. If you want to see the tree, I’ll show you the tree.

This is the preface. Everything else is chapters.