eredien | Once More Around the Ring

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Once More Around the Ring

Most of you, even the ones I've known for years, don't know that I was born four months premature, weighed a little over a pound, and almost died a couple of times.

I purposefully didn't tell you--because it's fine with me that you didn't know that.

You see, I've been known by that, as that, for a long time now. I'm starting to get really sick of it.

B.F., once-Songsmistress, also of BMC's class of '04, came up to me on graduation day and said, "hey-- my mom saw your name on the program, and we were in the same intensive care unit together. Isn't that amazing!" I like B. Yes, it is amazing. But my mother was confused: how could I have been friends with someone for four years and not told them my miraculous life story?

Imagine if someone showed you pictures of your first birthday party. They might be interesting, and you might have made a cute baby, and there may be funny anecdotes in the offing. But those pictures are for other people to remember you by--parents, relatives, family friends. They're not for you.

I feel as if the first three years of my life are a picture like that, except that the event was so life-changing for other people that I'm expected to: make comments about the taste of the frosting on the cake I never ate, bring up the fact that I had a party at every opportunity to complete strangers, and be interviewed in the paper about how I feel about having been at the bash.

Am I glad I survived? Yes.
But sometimes I feel like my family--my mom especially--is so fixated on the fact that I survived my earliest childhood that they've not moved past that.
I'll probably never get past the fact that I will always be unable to remember what is the most important event in my life, but every day I wake up and try to remember that I would like to be remembered for what I do with my life: for living, not surviving.
(And before anyone tells me that my birth and the attendant complications are not the most important event in my life: no matter what I think, it will always be percieved as such by my relatives, and therefore might as well be. So far it has been brought up at each birthday and at each graduation, including my college graduation. (Which I kinda hoped would be a day to celebrate my graduation with my family instead of reminding them of my past. But I'm not angry or bitter about that.) I expect it to be brought up after I publish my first novel, at my wedding, and at the birth of my children.)

B's mom just called and left a message on our answering machine. She said that the newspaper of the nearest large city is "very interested in talking to you about the human-interest story of B. and [Eredien]."

I don't know what to do. I've done two of these already when I was younger. I've been to countless March of Dimes functions where I was introduced as "[Eredien], my child that was a preemie" and then dutifully recited my birth weight. I've uncovered, in boxes, toddler-sized t-shirts for myself that said "million-dollar baby" in spangly letters because that's about how much it cost for the medical treatments. (My sister got the "high-risk baby" t-shirt--she wasn't as special.) I go through the family video collection and uncover taped TV specials on premature babies.

What is there to say? They survived, isn't that great, and they went to the same college, and then they found each other on their graduation day, and how wonderful.

But I'd feel this same resentment if I didn't do this newspaper thing. And I wouldn't get to see B. And my mother wouldn't understand and we'd both be confused, annoyed, angry, and bitter. And I'd feel obscurely guilty about something I can't even remember.

If I can't remember it, why am I so angry about it?

This is why I don't know my first words: I don't even know if anyone wrote them down. Most of the baby pictures in my album are of this wrinkled thing that looks like a gerbil with needles stuck in. Because it was more important to everyone that I survived than what I did afterwards.

Or at least that's the way it seems to me.
What should I do?

Dear God, please help me.

I don't want to feel
like a trick horse trotting rings
let me leap the fence

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Perhaps if you explain that you are tired of being put on the spot like that and its wearing you down?

BTW: To some of us you are a special person anyway *hugs*

I never realized people make such a fuss over a premature baby, twenty-some years later.

But now that I think about it, that woman in England who was the first test tube baby gets featured in the news every few years, whenever there's a significant new technique in fertility treatment. I guess she must be tired of it too.

Congratulations on your graduation, btw. I wonder if there might be a way to get the newspaper to focus on your & your friend's recent achievements?

Thank you! I thought, and continue to think, about how this might be good exposure for B. and I; I can't decide if that cancels out my annoyance at the fact that they'll definitely be putting an angle on the story--definitely they want to go for the "first the ICU and then the college" spin.

I'm not going to give you advice on what to do.

Just something to think about -

I don't know you all that well. Have known you vaguely for a couple of years, and somewhat better this past year. And this is something we have talked about. Although we didn't talk much about how you feel about it - and maybe that's something we should have, maybe I should have asked, who knows. So yeah, I knew. So I know it's part of you. But I also know it isn't all of you. When I think of you, I think of Dragons. And "Daddy Long Legs," and "Rocky Arthur" and latex and the sushi-stress-o-meter and a bunch of other things. That's living.

If - IF - you do the article, maybe you could get some of that across, that you are so much more what you have made of yourself. And maybe, even, they might print some of that. And even if they didn't, maybe it would be a helpful thing.

You could think of it this way - it's sort of like the two of you came from this same very very small town and only found out THAT on your college graduation day. Would that be a story you would want to tell? In a way it's true.

I think, to our parents, all of us are still fundimentally both an infant and about twelve. And its hard for them to move past seeing us that way, even with striking evidence to the contrary. And whoever finds a solution to that will deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

Find me if you want to talk.

Yes, and they would deserve the Peace Prize. *grin*

But it's a town I moved out of once I was one year old.

And while I may have mentioned it to other people in the past, I think you're the only one I ever talked with about it at any kind of length.

If - IF - you do the article, maybe you could get some of that across, that you are so much more what you have made of yourself.

Not a bad suggestion. If you decide on that route, Eredien, I would suggest stressing that point to the reporter, or it might get lost when he or she slims down your quotes into a story.

If you decide to do the article, [and frankly I have no idea if it's worth the stress to do so] remember that you owe the newspaper NOTHING. Therefore, I think it would be good that you demand the right to preview the article before it runs, etc, and make sure you can get a word in about how being a miracle preemie has shadowed you your whole life. Like, or maybe they'd be nice enough to reprint part of this journal entry or something. Just a thought. Maybe I'm too idealistic. I'd like to think not all reporters are scum.

Actually, not all reporters are scum. They're just people trying to do their job.
Reporters are trained to steer the conversation the way they want. However, you can change that if you remember what you want to say. Eredien - try writing out some things that you want to say before hand and take it with you. You don't have to answer their questions.
The point of a human interest story is to say something interesting about humans. You have lots of interesting things to say. It's really up to you which of those things you choose to let out.

I guess what I meant was more like, yes, they have to do their jobs, but they ought to let you say how the event has affected you instead of asking leading questions only. Does that make better sense?

Yeah, I understand your point.
Reoprters often ask leading questions to get the interview going. For people like Eredien, who know what they want to say, the questions are not really necessary and yes, the reporter should let the interviewee just tell it like it is. But not many people are like Eredien and lots have no idea what they want to say when they have to go in for an interview.

Do we even know what the final verdict is on whether or not she's doing the interview?

But yeah, she didn't like, just witness a tornado. This event was central to her life and we can tell it and the way her family has handled it has affected her deeply. If she does the interview, she ought to have the right to mention at least in some sort of way that in some ways, the family considers surviving her greatest achievement.

I would never want any of this journal published, except for the poems on it. It's not to be published, or spread around, or anything like that. That's some of why I started it in the first place--I wanted a place where I could share with friends what I thought with varying levels of privacy.

And I think that talking about that would help me, but alienate my parents and family--they wouldn't see why my life being shadowed by a miracle would be a bad thing.

I didn't mean give them the URL or even a copy of this entry so much as maybe express some of what you said here to the reporter as well if you go through with it.

I'm a journalist -- the jury might still be out on me, but I can promise you some of the reporters I work with aren't scum. :)

Don't expect any paper to agree to change a story before publication, though, unless it's to correct a factual error. That's the way we play it in the UK, and though American publications might have slightly different policies, I doubt they're that different.

The jury threw your case out, Rai: you pled insanity, remember? ;)

You're about as far from scum as you can get; don't worry.

Finally, I found someone that can get my family off of my back. *thinks hopefully*

I have a similar problem, though not near to the degree that you do. In my case, I was born two weeks late, at 3 pounds 11 ounces. But, it's been a family anecdote to talk about me being the smallest baby in the family in God knows how many generations.

It's shadowed my life enough to tell it now. But, I keep no connection of my own to that story, because it is a recollection of events that happened before I was old enough to remember. It doesn't concern me, just as you feel (and I agree with you too...) that your birth experience has little to no connection to you.

There are (ASAIK) no lasting mental or physical effects of being born small. We all grow up. Now if the maximum size a hypothetical being could grow was directly proportional to their size at birth (individually, not by race), then I could see relevance of this event to keep on you throughout life. But, it isn't.

Anyhow, the reason why I went on this tangent is because I agree with the other comments, but I have little to add directly about writing articles. I agree with the advice given you, and I just had that other take to present.

I agree with all the other comments, and really hope it works out. That must be infuriating to have your birth shadowed over you like that if it doesn't have any affect on you now physically. I kind of like having an exciting birth story, but that's probably because my family doesn't constantly remind me of it, and I still have things like scars and annual trips to the cardiologist that make it relevant, even though I can hope that nothing more will ever go wrong with me.

Well, I hope that you don't have any further complications. I imagine that your annual visits are due to surgery, or somesuch, so, cheers to your continuing good health.

There are (ASAIK) no lasting mental or physical effects of being born small.

That's not entirely true--it depends on how early you were born. If your heart or lungs aren't developed enough, there's big problems. Some insane percentage of premature babies have mental retardation or other problems because their brains simply did not have enough time to grow correctly.

I'm lucky; I think I only got a voice thing from being on a respirator, a greater propensity to latex allergy, and a sensitivity to bright light (apparently, and I just found this out this week, they covered my eyes for about a month because they had me under bright heat lamps that would have otherwise blinded me).

But thanks for the comments.

Yw. Hmm. That would explain why I have a similar extreme dislike for bright lights. I spent two weeks in an incubator, with my eyes taped.

I maybe understand a little what you're going through - the local paper has run two stories on me, one about the "thirteen year old going to college" and the other about the "seventeen year old graduating from college," and it's been really annoying. My mother parades me around town saying, "this is *my* daughter, who had an article about her in the Daily Progress!" It's a bit different, since it is actually something that has to do with me, but I still try not to let it be widely known, because people tend to treat me really differently if the know before they know me well. That's why I transferred to Bryn Mawr, so nobody would know until they at least knew me a bit better. I didn't have a choice about whether the articles would appear; my parents just said, "we've talked to this lady at the Daily Progress, she'll be calling to interview you about an article." The first one bothered me, since I was still in school here, and I got teased a lot for the rest of the year. But, the one at graduation didn't matter so much, since I won't be living here anymore, so it's only a problem when I'm at home. I can't really offer any suggestions - I would rather have not done it, if it had been my choice, but then again it did make my parents really happy, and I don't have to deal with it much, since I can't visit home often from California anyway. It probably just depends how often you'll be around people who wouldn't otherwise know. I just try to think about it as something for my parents, which I just have to endure. Good luck in deciding!

-Phoenix

Yes. Thanks for posting this. :)

Did you get my message on your cellphone? I think I found your stuffed leopard (jaguar?) in my sister's room. Does it have a pink nose? Should I send it to you?

... I had no idea who you were until I just read this.

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Once More Around the Ring

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