Sunday had been Mother’s Day. Funny.

Late the next day, we leaned on those old cushions, and I told her all about what I’d been up against. “There should be some kind of summer camp,” I said, “because this business of being tossed out on our asses into the real world is shitty.” Darin had just recently pushed me down a flight of stairs because he loved me and wanted to get back together. I didn’t have a job with which to float my $550 share of the rent. The dark blue folder Dean Whomever handed me at the end of the graduation stage was empty because we owed Columbia more than a thousand bucks. And then there was the issue of the toddler that should have been cheering me on with the rest of the family.

“They told me to get rid of you, you know?” she whispered, sitting on the floor next to me, not looking at me. I was having growing pains, and she wanted to show me some of her own stretch marks, I guess. “But I didn’t want to do that again.”

It was 1972, and Frances was a pregnant sophomore in college. The story sounded so familiar, I wanted to stop her before she got started. Wait a minute; we’ve seen this one already. Do a quick channel check. She was the exact same age I’d been. In the middle of our mother-daughter bonding session, I learned we almost weren’t mother and daughter.

She’d been in and out of love with my father Billy since high school, as well as a few girls she’d met at Humboldt State. She told me she’d gotten pregnant at nineteen and waited until the last legal minute to end it. Billy, who was in the navy, wanted to get married. He had it all planned out, she said. Frances would move back to Los Angeles—in with his mother—and wait for him to come back from long tours on a boat filled with men. She thought this idea ridiculous.

“Wendy said, ‘Okay, Frances, if you’re going to do this you have to do it now,’” she recalled my godmother telling her while her belly was getting bigger and she was still a teenager. The two drove up to San Francisco and got everything “handled.” All I could think about was the scene in Dirty Dancing when Penny gets a botched abortion that no one really talks about aside from Baby’s dad calling whatever “doctor” Penny went to a “butcher.” I wonder whether Frances went to one of these dirty-wire-hanger-type places and whether whatever I did was any better.

My father was told after. So when Frances realized I was trying to exist in 1980, she wanted me—badly—and he was…blasé.

It might make other people feel, I don’t know, uncomfortable to find out that they could have been aborted. That they could very well not be alive—conscious, in existence, present, or whatever right at this moment—as they think, process, and type. Not me. Well, not me, really. I was chosen. Cho-sen. Didn’t that count for more? Or maybe I’d been waiting in the wings since 1972, made invisible by a magical blue pill.

She told me that my grandmother and aunts, the majority of whom had found themselves pregnant before their eighteenth birthdays, sat her down to explain ever so calmly that babies weren’t in her future.

“You can’t bring a child around all that,” my mother recalled them saying. All that, I’m guessing, meant freaky sex orgies—which most everyone can agree aren’t childproof. I picture her mutinous then, defending her right to get knocked up just like everybody else. By then she was the only one of her seven siblings without a child and quickly approaching thirty (which is like forty when you adjust for inflation since 1980). I’m also guessing the grandchildren quota must have already been reached, or at least the grandchildren-from-lesbians-with-armpit-hair quota, which was obviously zero.

As a kid, I thought cameras and camcorders had not been invented before I turned five, because there does not exist any physical evidence of my being born. When I told her this, she laughed. You didn’t start the world, Raggedy Ann.

It’s really because my mother pretty much did the whole thing by herself.

For my last twenty-seven birthdays, we’ve had only one constant tradition—she must tell me the story of my birth. When I was smaller than her, I’d climb into her bed during the dark part of the morning and spread myself across her stomach, staring at her hard