In the beginning was the word

...and the word was Normal.  Or perhaps, Boring. Or -- no, no, let me start over.

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If this were a proper biography, it would start with Facts, with a capital f.  Lots and lots of facts. Where and when I was born, down to the minute and the hospital room. Who my parents were, perhaps. And I could start there, if I wanted to -- I suspect I would sound like I'm writing a report for school.  Not as bad as the ones you get assigned when you are learning a second language and you have five vocabulary words and very simple syntax: my name is such and such, I have one sister. I have a mom and a dad. I like purple.

But in another sense it really doesn't matter what day I was born (the fourth of November, for anyone curious) or where (in the Midwest, though we moved out West when I was all or eighteen months old so I don't remember living out there). What matters is that, firstly, I was a fairly normal child, and that secondly, I don't remember much of my childhood.

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I was born early (I was, I believe, supposed to have been a Thanksgiving baby) and more or less healthy. Or at any rate if there were problems or complications, I was never told.  The only weirdness was that the big toe on each foot was malformed: short, missing a joint (which is the phrasing I remember from childhood onward, but I think it involved also missing a full segment of the toe), and curved sharply inward.

This will be important later, but at the time the general attitude was "well, that's inexplicable, but it doesn't seem harmful, just strange."  It didn't affect my walking at all, though I learned to have ready an explanation of "I dunno, I was just born that way" whenever I went barefoot, in answer to the inevitable questions of "what's wrong" or "how do you do that". It made finding shoes a tad difficult because I had wide feet to begin with and the curve of my small, strange big toe made them wider. But it was just sort of how I was, like my brown eyes and brown hair and irregularly-freckled arms.

I was born into a family of one sister (older by three years), one mother (older by a wee bit more than that), and one father; into a family of white-skinned middle class people that seemed normal to me.  I knew from fairly early on that other people were different -- our next door neighbors were from Pakistan; there was a boy in my pre-school with black skin that made his teeth and eyes seem very white; and so on -- but for all the period of my growing up, what we were was the default in my head.  I knew from a very young age that, as a girl, I would grow up and marry a boy and get a house and a dog and a couple of kids, in some order, and the boy who would be my husband (who was probably going to be white-skinned and brown-haired and mustached and bearded just as my dad was) would go off and have a job and I would stay home and take care of the house and kids.

Spoiler: Not very much of my life has turned out the way I thought it would.