Sharing a birthday with my mom is ‘like our own holiday’ — that’s tricky to navigate
My mom didn’t plan to spend her 21st birthday in a Las Vegas hospital giving birth to me. She did all she could to avoid it.
Her initial due date had been two weeks prior to her big day, but after doing everything from going on a long, bumpy drive in my grandfather’s truck to pacing back and forth inside of a shopping mall to trigger her labor, I wasn’t budging.
When her doctor asked what day she preferred to be induced into labor, she told him any day but her birthday. “I would have wanted to have a drink or something,” she recently told me.
She and her doctor settled on Sept. 7, but as many birth stories go, her labor didn’t go as planned. Nearly 24 hours and a caesarean section later, I was finally born on the dawn of Sept. 8, the same day as my mother.
I can understand why my mom, who’s an only child, wanted to have Sept. 8 all to herself. Birthdays are the one time of year when your loved ones likely come together to
