For decades, I harbored a resentment against my parents, both of whom are now gone, and an emotion close to shame or diminished self-worth. It concerns the circumstances under which I was created and what my mom and dad never told me.
The ironic part is that my emotions should have been completely flipped. All along, I should have been celebrating this history, my good fortune and any higher force that may have been involved. Here’s the story.
Joe and Ethel, my parents, were married in 1941. My brother Frank was born in 1943, and my sister Sue arrived the following year. It was then eleven years until I was born in 1955. My younger brother Mike came along two years later. One of my first memories is of my parents coming home from the hospital with my baby brother. We were meant to grow up together.
Even at a young age, as our personalities developed, it became clear that Mike and I were very different and not necessarily compatible. In childhood, we fought constantly, with some of the confrontations becoming physical. I was physically bigger, but he was quicker. On one occasion, Mike jumped with his arm extended in a fist toward me from the top step of our row home’s front stoop. He connected with my face, and a black eye welled up. He enjoyed reminding me of that episode for years.
The irony of this is that my mother often said that Mike was conceived so that I would have a playmate and not grow up alone. I guess it didn’t turn out quite the way she had hoped, with our continuous yelling and fighting. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be at all.
By the time we hit our teens, we both started going our own ways. We didn’t do things together, and we didn’t have friends in common. But then, we didn’t fight either.
When I was old enough to put two and two together, I realized that although my mom was always clear about Mike’s creation story, she never said a word about my road to being. That led me to the conclusion that I was “unplanned.” However, in my mind, it felt more like “mistake” than “unplanned.” I let that gnaw at me for years and never spoke to either of my parents about it.
Recently, I read a fascinating and entertaining book by a science writer, Maria Konnikova, who set a goal to learn poker to and compete in the World Series of Poker. In the book, The Biggest Bluff, she writes about the role of chance or luck in poker, which can be extrapolated to life in general. It made me realize that chance plays a fundamental role in all of our lives.
For me, my conception was at the tail end of hundreds of years of unintended occurrences. My father met my mother because they had both been born in Philly and were living there as young adults. My dad’s parents had emigrated separately from Sicily and had married in Philadelphia. (It is not clear whether they knew each other in Sicily, but we do know that he left a wife and child behind when he departed.) My mom was the product of a brief marriage between her mother, who had always lived in Philly, and a U.S. Navy sailor from Texas who was stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Yard.
The chance that was involved in just those two couplings was significant. Now, go back through earlier generations and into the undocumented past. How many thousands of chance occurrences and “unplanned” babies through the eons eventually led to me? Homo sapiens emerged 300,000 years ago. It’s fair to say that the role of chance led to each and every one of us. We are all here by chance.
Why did it take me so many years to appreciate this? I guess it was a gap in my education – no philosophy classes. It was also partially my bias to always look ahead rather than to dwell on the past (despite all of the looking back that I am doing now for these blog posts). And the funny part is that it was a book about poker that sent me down this particular pathway of understanding.
Now, as I consider my own history, my years of resentment have turned to joy at being alive. My parents may not have planned for me, but they created me, and I have lived for 66 years. Without the circumstance, unknown to me, that led to my conception, I would not exist.
Chance. Fortune. Luck. A roll of the dice. Whatever. I am happy to be here. My lifelong existentialist crisis has been resolved.