We are who we are and we get what we get. That is what it is.
I was born in the United States, in New York, in fact. I was born white. I was born to a mother who’d suffered two miscarriages in the two years before me, and with a brother who was part of a twin. My brother’s twin was still-born and my brother was born very sickly. He wasn’t expected to live. But he did pull through. He survived.
I was born with a lazy eye. I write about this in my fiction sometimes, not often. I had three major eye operations when I was three. I say three at three, but I might have been four. No matter. I was a skinny baby, born pre-mature like my brother, until the eye operations. I spent the better part of the year of those operations with a patch over one eye at a time and mostly laying on the green couch in our living room. I remember the light from the black-and-white TV flickering against the wall over the couch. I got fat laying on that couch and have had a weight problem ever since then. All my life my weight has been up and down.
You get what you get.
So on that couch my mother fed me Campbell’s tomato soup made with milk, not water, and with a whole load of saltines crushed into it. One of my comfort foods.
Nowadays, they know all about those first few formative months, the time when babies are supposed to be coddled and cuddled and held, when touch and having needs met are most critical to forming trust and becoming well-adjusted. Well, my brother and I were incubator babies. So much for that. My brother was in the hospital a very long time.
You get what you get, the luck of the draw.
Me? I’m spatially retarded. I talked about this before too. By today’s standards, no doubt I would’ve been special education. Back then? Who knew? It’s about imaging and how my eyes work. So my initial image-forming on my brain was skewed due to my lazy eye and the simple fact that even after the operations my eyes do not work together well. Hence, I have poor hand-eye coordination and I lost every game of Foosball to my friend Richie, who has super hand-eye coordination, 11-0 or 21-0. He let me score sometimes so I would keep playing with him.
You get what you get, the luck of the draw, and it is what it is.
On and on.
That father I was born to spent three and a half years in Stalag IIIB Furstenberg in World War II. Yes. He was a Jew in a Nazi POW camp, a survivor. He came home emaciated like a concentration camp survivor. The galley on the ship transporting the liberated POWs was open 24/7 and the POWs could eat anything and everything they wanted, any time they wanted. My father once told me he was so seasick he couldn’t eat.
So I was born to a survivor who suffered from PTSD along with several physical illnesses. Our wonderful government that nowadays does more for illegal immigrants than for most citizens in need while expecting the citizens to pay for it, gave my father an 8% disability, not enough to get benefits, to be treated in a VA, or to be buried in Arlington.
You get what you get. The luck of the draw. It is what it is.
(to be continued)
