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

[ghostsphoenix.livejournal.com]

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

[eredien]

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?

[batshua]

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