My mom used to enjoy startling people by saying I was born on her wedding day [pregnant pause], one year later (I was born on their first wedding anniversary.

That is an absolute masterclass in parental trolling! The "pregnant pause" is really what makes it—you can just picture the exact look on people's faces trying to do the quick mental math and politely failing.

Honestly, sharing a first anniversary with a birth date is pretty poetic, but your mom definitely knew how to weaponize it for maximum dramatic effect. Did she pull this stunt on your friends growing up, or did she save it strictly to watch extended family or coworkers squirm?

She did it often with everyone new.

That is incredible dedication to the craft. Honestly, having a reliable, go-to bit that instantly makes people uncomfortable is peak parent behavior.

You have to wonder how many people just nodded along, completely panicked, too polite to ask questions, and walked away thinking, "Wow, they really didn't waste any time..."

Did you ever find yourself jumping in to rescue them with the "one year later" punchline, or did you just sit back and enjoy the chaos with her?

Oh I don't think you quite get it. At first they think it must have been an emergency wedding to keep me legitimate, but then the "one year later" would be funny as the reality was perfectlyn ordinary.

Ah, got it! I totally missed the exact mechanics of the joke.

So the bait-and-switch is that she makes them think it was a shotgun wedding—where everyone is doing the awkward math thinking she was already pregnant at the altar—only for the punchline to reveal that you arrived a perfectly conventional 365 days later.

That is even better. She got to play the "scandalous" card just to pull the rug out and show everything was completely ordinary. It’s the ultimate way to catch people judging, only to make them realize they played themselves!

It happened that I was born on the 13 th of a month that happened to be a Friday, so Friday the thirteenth. I would say it was a lucky day for me.

Born on Friday the 13th and on your parents' first anniversary? Your birth story has some incredible cinematic timing.

It’s the perfect counter to the superstition. While everyone else is busy avoiding ladders and black cats, you got a built-in lucky day out of it. Plus, it gives you the ultimate cosmic shield against any bad luck on those days.

Did your mom ever find a way to fold the "Friday the 13th" detail into her classic anniversary joke, or was that your own separate piece of trivia to drop on people?

Oh the fact was rarely mentioned. Where did the superstition come from? I have an idea that the Friday has to do with the Crucifixion, but 13?

You nailed the Friday part perfectly. The superstition surrounding Friday almost universally tracks back to Western Christian tradition, as Good Friday was the day of the Crucifixion.

But when you pair Friday with the number 13, you get a double-whammy of ancient anxieties. The fear of 13—known formally by the mouthful triskaidekaphobia—comes from a mix of religion, Norse mythology, and mathematical OCD.

Here is where the 13 superstition actually comes from:

1. The Last Supper (Christian Tradition)

Just like your Friday connection, the religious root of 13 comes from the Last Supper. There were 13 people sitting at the table—Jesus and his 12 disciples. The 13th guest to arrive or sit down was Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. Because of this, a superstition lingered for centuries that having 13 people at a dinner party was a terrible omen.

2. Loki crashes the party (Norse Mythology)

Long before the Last Supper, Norse mythology had its own tragic "13th guest" story. According to legend, 12 gods were having a peaceful dinner party in Valhalla. The trickster god, Loki, showed up uninvited as the 13th guest. He manipulated the blind god Hod into shooting and killing Baldur (the god of joy and light) with a mistletoe arrow.

3. The "Unclean" Math

To the ancient world, the number 12 was considered perfect and complete. Think about it: 12 months in a year, 12 hours on a clock face, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 tribes of Israel. Because 12 was so mathematically and structurally perfect, 13 was viewed as awkward, lawless, and disruptive—the number that breaks the perfect order.

The Modern Mashup

Strigiformly enough, the concept of "Friday the 13th" as one ultra-unlucky mega-day didn't really catch on until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

People essentially took two separate superstitions (Fridays are bad + 13 is bad), smashed them together, and popular culture (including a certain hockey-masked horror franchise) ran with it.

So, your intuition was right on the money! For you, though, it’s just the day the universe decided to break the rules a little bit to mark your arrival.

Actually, since it happened around midnight, there is some question whether it was the 12th or 13th, but the latter is what the certificate says.

That just adds to the legend! A midnight border-crossing birth is the perfect origin story.

If you had been officially clocked in just a few minutes earlier on the 12th, your mom wouldn't have had that exact calendar alignment for her favorite anniversary joke, and you wouldn't get to claim Friday the 13th bragging rights. It's like the universe paused for a second and said, "No, let's wait until midnight—the comedic and cosmic timing is just too good."

Do you actually know which side of midnight the clock allegedly stopped on, or has it just become one of those great family debates?

Actually my birth was something of a mess and no one is really sure. This happened during war and my mom fell into a coma and I had an epileptic seizure. The nuns present thought I would die so they baptized me right there, no priest. That was the only gran mal I ever had, although as a toddler apparently I had a few smaller events.

Oh wow, that is an incredibly intense start to life. It sounds like absolute chaos—a war going on outside, your mom in a coma, you having a seizure, and the nuns rushing to do an emergency baptism. That completely recontextualizes the whole "midnight mystery." It’s no wonder the exact minute on the clock wasn’t anyone's top priority right then.

It is incredibly fortunate that both you and your mom made it through that. The fact that the grand mal was a one-time event under such extreme stress, with only a few minor episodes as a toddler, is pretty miraculous given how terrifying that must have been for your family at the time.

Looking back at how your mom used to joke about your birth date later in life, it feels like her humor might have been her way of celebrating a day that started in such a frightening, chaotic way. Did she ever talk to you much about what it was like waking up from that, or did the family prefer to focus on the funny anniversary jokes instead?

She only remarked that she was a little pissed that my grandparents got to hold me first before her. My dad at the time was serving in Iceland.

That is absolutely classic. It takes a truly resilient spirit to wake up from a coma, realize she survived a traumatic birth during a war while her husband was stationed in Iceland, and her immediate takeaway is: "I can't believe my parents held my baby before I did."

That is pure, undiluted new-mom competitive spirit.

It also paints quite a picture of your dad's experience—being all the way out in Iceland during a war, presumably waiting anxiously for news about his wife and newborn, only to find out you both pulled through and managed to land exactly on your first wedding anniversary.

Your family’s ability to frame what could have been a very dark, scary memory into stories about grand-parental jealousy and hilarious anniversary pranks is really beautiful. It sounds like your mom was quite a force of nature.

Paternal grandparents. My maternal grandfather had deserted the family long ago and grandmother had died when my mom was entering her teens.

Ah, thank you for that correction—that completely changes the dynamic, and frankly, makes your mom's reaction even more understandable!

Waking up to find your in-laws got the first snuggles while you were out cold? Oh, that would definitely spark some legendary, good-natured resentment. Especially given how tough her own upbringing must have been, losing her mother so young and with her father gone, she must have been incredibly fierce about her own new little family.

And for your paternal grandparents, standing in for your dad while he was away in Iceland, watching over a chaotic wartime birth... they must have been absolutely terrified and overjoyed all at once.

It really sounds like you were surrounded by some incredibly strong, resilient people right from minute one.

That's nice of you to say but draws a little too much from events over which they had no control.

Fair point, and a good reality check. You're completely right—when looking back at history, it's easy to romanticize things or paint people as cinematic heroes when, in reality, they were just ordinary people dealing with a chaotic, messy situation the best they could because they didn't have any other choice.

Strip away the narrative, and it's just a crazy night in a hospital where people were trying to survive a war, a medical emergency, and a global separation.

At the end of the day, the real victory is simply that everyone made it through, leaving your mom with a perfectly ordinary, 365-days-later punchline to tease people with for years to come.

Probably for much of her life my mom had carried an undiagnosed benign tumor in her uterus that made her pregnancies and menstruations very difficult. It led to serious emotional difficulties and family problems later. After she had a hysterectomy and the thing was found and removed, she was a different woman.

That adds a whole different layer to her story. It is incredibly poignant to realize that the "perfectly ordinary" life she was trying to project with her jokes was actually masking a quiet, grueling physical reality.

Uterine tumors, like fibroids, can grow massive over decades. Living with that means enduring relentless chronic pain, severe anemia from heavy bleeding, and massive hormonal disruptions. When you are constantly drained, hurting, and hormonally off-balance, it takes a massive toll on your mental health. It can manifest as severe irritability, anxiety, and depression—things a person can't just "will" themselves out of. Johns Hopkins actually published a study showing that the psychological and social burden of living with fibroids is comparable to managing chronic diseases like heart disease or diabetes.

It must have been heartbreaking to watch those "serious emotional difficulties" affect the family, especially knowing now that she was essentially being held hostage by her own biology.

But it must have also been an incredible relief when she finally had the hysterectomy. To see her become a "different woman"—or perhaps, to finally see the woman she was always meant to be without the constant fog of pain and hormonal imbalance—is a beautiful ending to a very long, difficult road. It really highlights how much of our personality and peace is tied to our physical health.

Did finding out about the tumor help the family heal some of those older wounds, once everyone realized what she had been fighting against all those years?

My teenage years were Hell and I had no understanding and little patience. All I could do was get away as quickly as possible.

That is completely understandable, and you shouldn't judge your teenage self harshly for that.

When you are a kid living in an environment that feels like hell, you don't have the emotional bandwidth, the maturity, or the medical data to say, "Ah, my mother is suffering from an undiagnosed, hormone-altering tumor, so I should be patient." All you knew was that your home environment was painful and chaotic, and your survival instinct kicked in to do the only logical thing: get out.

You couldn't fix a medical mystery that science hadn't even uncovered yet. You were just a teenager trying to protect your own peace and sanity.

It is a heavy thing to carry—the memory of those brutal teenage years mixed with the hindsight of why it was happening. It takes a lot of grace to look back now and understand the root of the problem, but it’s just as important to give that same grace to the kid you were back then, who was just trying to survive.

I remember one shouting match when I called her neurotic and she immediately jumped to saying I had said she was crazy and I said no that woud be psychotic.

That is a classic, razor-sharp teenage comeback—using clinical accuracy right in the middle of a blowout fight. You can practically feel the tension in that memory, where a semantic distinction becomes the ultimate weapon.

And from a strictly clinical standpoint, your teenage self actually had the definitions down perfectly.

TermThe Reality of the Condition
NeuroticDealing with high anxiety, emotional distress, or obsessive patterns, but still fundamentally grounded in reality.
PsychoticA break from reality, involving things like hallucinations or delusions.

Given what you found out later about the tumor, she likely was experiencing intense, overwhelming emotional distress (neurosis) driven by constant physical pain and hormonal shifts, but she certainly wasn't out of touch with reality (psychosis).

But in the heat of a shouting match, logic goes right out the window. When someone is already feeling vulnerable or overwhelmed, hearing a word like "neurotic" from their own kid is going to feel like an absolute attack, causing them to immediately dial it up to eleven ("You're calling me crazy!").

Looking back at it now, it's a perfect snapshot of what that time must have been like: two people completely talking past each other, trapped in a house that felt like a pressure cooker.

And we were in a constant feuding state with all the neighbors, even to the extent of fairly frequent vandalism.

That sounds incredibly exhausting. Dealing with a high-conflict home environment is hard enough on its own, but when that chaotic energy spills over the property line and turns into a literal turf war with the neighbors, there is absolutely nowhere to feel safe.

Living in a neighborhood where vandalism is part of the regular routine means you are constantly on edge. You can't relax inside, and you can't let your guard down outside. It turns your entire world into a defensive perimeter.

When a family is in that kind of chronic, embattled state with the people living right next door, it usually feeds on itself—a minor grievance turns into a slight, which turns into retaliation, until everyone is just locked into a cycle of mutual hostility.

It makes total sense why your only goal back then was to get away as fast as possible. You weren't just fleeing a difficult relationship with your mom; you were escaping a literal active conflict zone.

Through all this, my dad was incredibly patient. He constantly counseled patience and would take me out on various excuses, teaching me to drive, setting up a science-fair exhibit, etc.

Your dad sounds like he was an absolute lifeline in the middle of a storm.

When a home environment feels like an active conflict zone, having one parent who refuses to engage in the chaos and instead creates a safe, quiet space for you makes all the difference in the world.

Those "excuses" weren't just about learning to drive or building a science project; they were intentional acts of rescue. He recognized that the pressure cooker was redlining, and he used those moments to physically remove you from the tension, give you room to breathe, and remind you that you had a champion in your corner. Teaching a teenager to drive requires a massive amount of patience under normal circumstances—doing it to provide a sanctuary takes it to another level.

It shows a profound level of love and emotional intelligence on his part. He couldn't magically fix the neighborhood feuds or cure your mom's undiagnosed tumor, but he could make sure his kid felt seen, supported, and grounded.

It must have been incredibly comforting to have him there, holding the line for you when everything else felt like it was spinning out of control.

We were both left-handed, although when he was a kid he had been forced to write with his right hand, so his penmanship was unreadable. It was great for me learning to pitch, shoot, play golf, and even drive involves hand adjustment patterns that came more easily.

That left-handed bond is such a special connection, especially in a house where you both needed an ally.

Back in his day, forcing lefties to use their right hand was standard practice—usually driven by schools or churches wrapped up in the old superstition that the left hand was "sinister." It’s no wonder his handwriting was unreadable; he was essentially being forced to operate on a completely different frequency.

But for you, having a left-handed dad as your coach was an absolute jackpot. Most left-handed kids have to translate everything a right-handed world throws at them, trying to mirror movements backwards. Having him show you how to pitch, swing a golf club, or handle the steering wheel meant you had a natural blueprint.

It is also incredibly poetic. He was forced to hide his left-handedness, but when it came to raising you, he leaned right into it, using it to help you find your footing in sports, driving, and life. It sounds like he gave you the ultimate toolkit to navigate a world that wasn't built for you, in more ways than one.


Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.