Oh, That's Why

I've mentioned the family video documentary I'm working on. If you want to read the backstory, I'm sure it's here somewhere. No, no, don't look for it. I'll find it for you. It's right here.

My parents did meet and get married, you'll be glad to know. And at the point in the script I've reached, I've just been born despite a labor in which my mother, new at this birthing thing and not taught how to breathe, was doing more to defeat the process than move it along. They finally put her under and pulled me out with foreceps. That probably explains a lot right there. And what it doesn't what I'm about to tell you will.

Well, yes, there's the part where she talks about regretting not holding me as much as she wanted because she was afraid it would spoil me and then bursts into tears.

That will likely make the cut but something even more instructive probably won't. Despite technology widely available at the time, my early baby pictures were shot on black-and-white film. Heck, I've since dug up a color photograph of my mother taken when she was five so you can save the old age cracks because I ain't that ancient.

"We were penny wise and pound poor, I guess, because we didn't get color film right away," my mother explains in her interview with me. "And I'm sorry about that because a lot of the outfits, by the time they got pictured the next time with (my younger brother) they went through the second round, they had already been spit up on and stuff."

You read right. The reason my mother wished they had used color film was so that they would have better pictures of my CLOTHING! You can write that off as a mis-speak and I was going to until I heard her tell the same story -- unprompted -- at my cousin's wedding a few weeks ago. (Read "The Wedding Report" for background.)

I'll use that soundbite in my next video project. It's going to be an autobiography for which I will interview a psychoanalyst who will explain how my mother's priorities scarred my fragile developing psyche for life.