My Creation

 

 I was created when my Dad came home for lunch.

According to my mother, there must have been a defect in the condom, and she must have not put the diaphragm in correctly while being mistaken with the date for a safe lunch-time treat.

Despite the obstacles there had to be one brave little feller that swam up to a welcoming egg.

As a much-loved child despite the attempts to stop my existence, I was mostly obedient. Obedient or not, part of me always had questions always wondering why. So many things I was told didn't seem right like that whole McCarthy thingie, what was so important about always being ladylike, and what's wrong with only eating egg whites and not the yolks? Why couldn't women be doctors? Why did women always have the station wagon and the men the good cars, although you couldn't eat ice cream in the good cars? Did you really have to cut your hair when you had children? Did washers and dryers come in any other colors than boring white?

One of my Dad's favorite saying was, "Show me, I'm from Missouri," even if he never set foot in that state. My grandfather, whom I called Puppy, sought the story behind the story. He is said to have said that the steel the U.S. sold to Japan prior to WWII would come back as weapons. 

It must have been their genes that were contained in that little feller looking for an egg. At the same time the genes in that egg had to be a reflection of my mother, who didn't follow convention if she didn't want to. She worked because she wanted to  - running first a cottage-industry cloth doll manufacturing business and later a clothing business where she sold fashions on a house-party plan.

I had dreamed of traveling the world not settling in my hometown. I dreamed of writing? I dreamed of books? I dreamed of not living the same life of people I grew up with even if they were nice.

It only became a reality in my 40s. I suspect that I'm one of the few graduates of Reading Memorial High School that permanently left my country, took up Swiss and Canadian nationality and gave up my American citizenship because of the draconian FATCA laws. I made a choice between my birth country and a bank account.

Did the egg that long ago day when my Dad came home for lunch, encourage that sperm? Did the stubbornness of that sperm make me stubborn, sending over 800+ CVs to find a job in Europeand mailing my first novel over and over despite the 40+ rejections? 

Now in the later part of my life, I realize, that the stubborn sperm and the come-hither egg created me probably part inheritance and part environment.  I never asked if my mother made lunch that day and if so, what did she make.