Once More Around the Ring

[eredien]

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

Comments

[batshua]

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.

[kaypendragon.livejournal.com]

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.

[batshua]

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?

[kaypendragon.livejournal.com]

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.

[batshua]

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.

[eredien]

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.

[batshua]

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.

[daisho.livejournal.com]

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.

[eredien]

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.