I was a very planned child.

I just celebrated my birthday yesterday, and so in celebration I bring you 26 entries (gradually) devoted to navel-gazing narcissism. Let the fun begin!

My brothers are twelve and fourteen years older than me, which spurs everyone to say, Oh, you must have been an accident!. Sometimes they diplomatically substitute little surprise, but you get the drift.

It's actually not true. I was an extremely planned child. It started around 1973, when my mother started a part-time job in the baby section of a Broadway department store. Apparently working amidst little tiny booties and little tiny sleepers and having customers come in with fuzzy-headed sleeping babies non-stop effects some sort of biopsychochemical change, because all the women my mother worked with, started getting pregnant.

Now, at this point in time, my mother had two small boys. Two very mischevious, very hyperactive and demanding elementary school boys, and while she'd wanted a daughter, she had her doubts about spending another eighteen years raising another very mischevious, very hyperactive boy.

So she thought about it. For two long years, she thought about having another kid, and didn't say a word about it to anyone. Including my father. And after two years, she finally decided that she wanted another baby so much that it didn't matter if it was another boy. I can only imagine the sort of reaction my father had when she declared her intentions.

So, in the last few weeks before my arrival, my mother had watched some sort of made-for-TV movie where the baby was born deformed, or with some disfiguring disease, and in this movie, the nurses kept describing the baby as "beautiful" or "an angel". I think you can see where this is going... my mother wears glasses, which had been removed for delivery, so she couldn't see much of anything. The baby emerges, the nurses cry It's a girl! and swaddle and wipe and coo She's beautiful! She's an angel! and my mother gets a little alarmed and says, Let me see her! Naturally, the nurses respond by telling my mother to relax and re-affirming my angelic status, further convincing her that there was something terribly wrong with me that they were afraid to tell her.

So for the first two or three minutes of my life, my mother was convinced that something had gone horribly awry.

After that, she was fooled into thinking I was normal for at least ten, twelve years.

Tuesday 22 January, 11:56 AM