Friday, July 01, 2011

sister conversations

Today I was chatty chattin' with my sister on the way home from work and somehow we ended up talking about birth weight which led me to sharing with her that at one point early in my life I believed that when I was born I weighed 8 lbs 7 oz. Only later in life (read: middle school or early high school) did I receive clarification on the issue. The truth was, I weighed 7 lbs 8 oz., and for some reason, this was both a relief and a source of great distress for me. I had shared this false and robust information to countless of my friends, only to find out that I was a normal, smaller sized baby.* (Having a little sister who weighed a mere 6 lbs 4 oz. at birth is a lot to live....down to?) I genuinely felt like I owed it to those people and to my reputation to go back and inform everyone I could think of about my correct birth weight.

After I told my sister this she responded with the following:

"Yeah, it's kind of like when I found out a couple years ago that my half birthday is actually June 5, and not on Cinco de Mayo like I always believed. I guess I could have just done the math, but you know."

*I know now, being an adult, that 8 lbs 7 oz is not abnormal. Please keep in mind that the girl feeling those feelings was young and without birthing experiences of her own to draw from.