My mom and dad married right out of high school. Actually, dad never made it to graduation; he left in the 11th grade, joined the Navy, and got his GED. Mom graduated and dad came home from wherever he was, married mom (in his dress blues, no less!) and moved her to Memphis, I think. I don't know if they lived anywhere else before moving to Corpus Christi, but eventually they found themselves there on the coast of Texas.

Mom was pregnant with me.

I was due sometime in October; I want to say mom has said the 8th or 9th. I know it was about two weeks before I was born. Mom's celebrated her 21st birthday on Wednesday, September 22 in the year 1976. She had a doctor's appointment that day. The doctor did his thing, and told her that I was fine and he would see her again the next week. My mother's maternal instinct made her tell him that she'd be seeing him before that.

Mom went into labor Saturday or Sunday and dad flew through the streets of the naval base in Corpus Christi to get her to the hospital. They got stopped by the MPs, who ended up escorting them. Once they got to the hospital, they had discovered that I was a breech baby. It seems like I remember mom telling me that four days prior, the doctor said I was positioned correctly, but that in those four days, I turned. I'm not sure now if she did, or even if that's possible. Regardless of if that is true or not, I was a breech baby.

She was already small, so I think they decided that a C-Section would be the best way to go. On Sunday, September 26, 1976 at 10:03 am, I was born.

My mom had been twenty-one for four days.

Now, almost thirty-one years later, I know my parents got married too young. They had all these ideas and dreams, which were dashed by the real world. They struggled for a long time to keep it together, and lasted for almost three years after my brother was born. It wasn't meant to be though; they were divorced by 1984. Dad was different than he had been, and mom changed soon after he left, if not before.

I love both of my parents, very much, and am close to both of them in different ways. But I wonder, sometimes, what life would have been like if they had waited. For one, I wouldn't be celebrating my thirty-first birthday next week. Secondly, I don't think mom and I would be as close as we are. We're friends now, and I think a lot of that is because we grew up together. She was so young, when she was raising me. When we moved to Mississippi in 1988, she was only thirty-three. She was just starting to grow up. I was eleven, and growing up too. I was a good kid, so she never had to discipline me. We settled into a relationship that was close, oftentimes far more friends than mother and daughter. Even now, if I have something I need to talk about, and I need to talk to my mom, I will go to her for advice, but I'll also go to my aunt Jane, because she really is a surrogate mother to me.

I love my mom, though. Her birthday is Saturday and she is so excited that I'm coming to see her. I got a lot of things for her birthday, but she keeps telling me all she wants is for me to come see her. And you know, I know she's telling the truth. If I showed up empty-handed, it would be like I gave her the world.