autobio

I was almost not admitted to life. My mom rejected my dad a whole year before she consented to love and marry him. Then her uterus rejected pregnancy for 11 more before I started growing there, and that was only because science intervened.

When I was 6 and my mom first told me that I was an in vitro baby I thought it made me a fake person. "Don't tell anyone!" I said. But any adult who knew me knew because apparently everyone was pretty gung ho about getting me born, and many people were somehow involved in the proceedings, as though I was conceived in a big metaphorical orgy.

Interfacing with childhood peers while burdened by my potential lack of humanity made things kind of awkward. I went to Jewish school and studied about lots of biblical women who were barren and prayed to god for a child who then became someone important like a prophet. I took note of this, and decided I was to become someone important.

Riding home from a barbecue one day, I watched rows and rows of pastel upper middle class suburban homes roll before me with the same easy countenance of my own. I wondered how my parents could deal with the fact that they were not famous and their lives were ordinary.

I got older and fatter. I was shy and didn't pick up the phone for a couple of years, but then I got better. I thought I was ugly, so I sublimed all of my teenage insecurity into academics. Somewhere in this age range I realized my parents weren't superheroes.

I got older and thinner. Nothing changed except I started dating, which mostly just made me feel stupid. Feeling stupid was helpful for me. Somewhere in this age range I realized that I would probably never be as good of a person as my parents each are.

My admission to college was my most natural admission thus far. Now that I'm there, I do all the awful stuff pop culture typifies, like eat fried food and dance stupidly when drunk on cheap beer. I might owe my life to science, but I don't study it; I just learn whatever useless stuff I enjoy, like poetry or the cultural implications of memory or how tourists write about italy. I laugh about how boned I am for the future as though my life were some big joke.

I know this is probably normal, and I'm sort of happy about that; I've wanted to be normal ever since my main motivation in life was to prove to those around me that I was a real girl. But while I don't have any aspirations to biblical level impact anymore, I'm also sort of worried. My parents (and co.) worked pretty hard to get me in here. I don't want my life to let them down.