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Birth

I feel like I have a special connection to Lauryn Hill's song "To Zion".

My mom was told to abort me for health reasons. She had previously had a heart attack and the doctor didn't think her heart could withstand a pregnancy. My mom stubbornly refused. Having a little girl was important to her and she was adamant that I was a girl though it was too early to know such a thing. Thanks for being stubborn mom; it literally saved my life.

I was an 80s baby. I grew up in a time when it was nothing to send your kid to buy your smokes and penny candies cost 1 cent, back when the penny still existed before they started taxing them. We rarely played inside the house or needed gadgets to amuse ourselves. Hide-and-seek, truth-or-dare, and random shenanigans like skinny dipping were common forms of entertainment. Sure we played video games like space invaders, pole position, and frogger, but mostly we preferred to hang out in nature. At least before Nintendo and Mario came along.

Perhaps my mother's stubbornness is within me, urging me to continue writing my novel despite the low probability of being successful. The truth is that I believe we define our own success and we only have to be ambitious enough not to take no for an answer. Sure, some things are out of our control, but many things are up to us and we only need to be brave enough to go after them. Yes, I realize it's awfully hard to be a J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't aspire to it if that's what you want to do. "Why not me?", I like to say. The only standard I'm aspiring to is my own. I have to be content with my product and I hope it will be successful enough to allow me to work part time instead of full time, so I have more time to write. Besides, both of them had a lot of rejections before they made it.

I'm on this Earth despite my mom being urged to kill me by medical professionals. Perhaps that has aided me in having the gumption to continue achieving my goals no matter the obstacles along the way or perhaps it is just some random fact that has had no bearing on the events that followed and my life in any other way beyond simply allowing me to continue developing within my mother.

I'm not sure why my mom told me this. She told me so in high school, but I was the kind of teen that would tell my parents to go and F themselves...

At any rate, I am on this planet. I'm thankful to be alive despite the anguish I've felt at various times because it has been balanced by joy at other times. I feel like the bad moments make me appreciate the good moments more.

It's a long weekend in Canada, and I intend to balance fun with getting things done.

Ciao,
R~

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