So far as I know, this is the first photograph of me.
You can see me right here.
I believe that because it’s a picture of Mom and Dad…
and because the back of the photograph says, “Halloween 1980. I’m carrying Chris!”
And I’m Chris!
I also know that Halloween was my doctor’s original suggestion for my scheduled cesarean birth, but Mom objected to giving me Halloween as a birthday.
And since Halloween 1980 was on a Friday, I was born first thing in the morning on Monday, November third.
Which means Mom was REALLY pregnant when this picture was taken. Pregnant enough that she could’ve gone into labor at any moment.
Clearly, Mom had no reservations about possibly giving birth to me while dressed as a clown.
I don’t know what the average person’s odds are of entering this world from a surgeon urgently slicing into a clown’s womb, and I don’t know what to make about where my odds of that once stood.
I also don’t know what kind of offbeat parents would do this to a child.
Probably the kind that would decorate a child’s bedroom like this:
I don’t remember that clown but I do remember that yellow wall.
It looks like an insane asylum (the hospital gown doesn’t help), but Mom loved it.
She was very proud that they painted it themselves with, “yellow paint and dust busters instead of a brush.”
She always laughed when telling that story. It sort of changed her disposition like she was reliving some sort of free and tender moment where she had just left behind New York City in favor of Nowhere, Connecticut and, first newborn in tow, decided this is the energy she’d surround her children with.
It’s hard for me to imagine a version of Mom as innocent and carefree as she’d suggest, but then again it’s hard for me to imagine her dressed in a couples costume with Dad, and I was there!
Looking through my inherited photo albums, it’s striking to me just how much the times seem to have left their mark on Mom’s young spirit.
When I see pictures like this, I wonder how much different Mom might’ve been before I knew her.
And I think about the versions of myself my kids will never know because I can never again be as responsibility-free as Mom and I used to be.
How interesting it must’ve been to know Mom then, young and sitting in front of a waterfall, or happily posing beside her husband on Halloween of 1980 with a third baby on the way; before divorce and teenagers, ailing parents, and cancer.
And only three days before me.
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