April Fools!

When I was born, no one believed it. Ecstatic, my dad made phone calls to my grandparents, my aunts and uncles.

"She had the baby!" he exclaimed.

"Yeah, right! April Fools!" No one believed him.

"No, really," he said. "She had the baby."

"Okay, ha ha! You're funny!" My aunt hung up the phone.

My dad is known to make jokes, which is why no one took him seriously on April Fool's Day thirty-one years ago. Plus, everyone had seen my mom the day before for Easter and everything had been perfectly normal. There had been no indication that her first-born child would arrive in less than twenty-four hours.

My dad had really tried. He tried to tell everyone. He also really tried not to have his child born on April Fool's Day. When my mom woke up that Monday morning, insisting she needed to go to the hospital, my dad refused. He didn't want the baby to be born on April Fool's Day.

Unfortunately, my parents didn't have a choice. I decided to make my appearance just after two o'clock in the afternoon. Apparently, there was no way I was waiting until April 2nd.

And so my life began. Little did I know that my life would be riddled with countless unlucky events that never seemed to happen to anyone else but me. As an adult, I think about how being born on April Fool's Day has been a joke, a foreshadowing of all the dumb unfortunate things that I've had to deal with in my life. It's just cruel irony, a hilarious curse. My life is just one big joke.

When I was barely a year old, my dad had given me the chicken pox. He had gotten it from work and proceeded to pass it along to me. Thanks, Dad! Luckily, I have no memory of having unbearably itchy skin and gained my varicella-zoster antibodies at a young age. Unluckily, my dad also decided to pass along some undesirable genes. These genes wouldn't show themselves until years later though.

In kindergarten, it snowed on my birthday. It was the first year I was going to be able to celebrate my birthday in school. My mom had made cupcakes and I was excited to share them with all of the other kids in my class until we got the call that we had a snow day. A snow day on April 1st? But it was technically spring. The sun was supposed to be shining, birds chirping, flowers blooming. Mother Nature decided to play her own April Fool's joke that year, as well as some other years along the way. The weather never seems to be nice on April 1st.

In elementary school, no one would believe me when I would say it was my birthday. All of my classmates thought it was just a joke. "April Fools! It's not really your birthday." But it was. It marked the start of never being taken seriously, always doubting myself, and keeping my mouth shut.

Wonderful things always happen around my birthday. There was the year my brother almost broke my nose and I had a multicolored bruise covering my face for my sixth birthday. My grandmother's funeral was only a couple of days before my seventeenth birthday. A few years later, I had a painful abscess on my tonsils days before I turned twenty. Almost two weeks after my twenty-first birthday, my grandfather passed away unexpectedly on Friday the 13th. And then there was the following year when I got into a car accident on the interstate the day after my twenty-second birthday. The state trooper wished me a happy birthday as he handed back my driver's license. Because a police report and an insurance claim make great birthday presents for a college student.

It's funny that my car seems to take the brunt of the random freak things that have happened in my life. Debris from an overpass busted my side mirror while driving through New York City, leaving me without a driver's side mirror for the remaining two hours of my trip back home. Someone who wasn't supposed to be making a U-turn hit my front driver's side wheel while I was making a right turn. There didn't appear to be damage at the time, but I quickly realized my alignment had been thrown off as soon as I drove away. During one summer while I was away at grad school, a newly installed custom wheel flew off of a Jeep going 40 mph on a main road. The driver barely made it a quarter mile down the road from the auto body place. The wheel bounced across the road and collided with the front bumper of my car, causing a total of $5,000 worth of damage. Luckily, no one was hurt. A family of mice chewed apart the wiring in my car, damaging the engine harness so badly that my car wouldn't start one morning. It took the mechanics almost two days to find the problem, and when they did, they took pictures of the mice since they didn't think I would believe them. Someone rear-ended me in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Long Island. A bus making a tight left turn caused me to hit a guardrail in the dark on a rainy October morning. My boyfriend's mom accidently hit the side of my car with her car door. Most recently, I scratched the front bumper with the metal edge of a snow shovel. My poor car. It has so many battle scars from my bad luck. It is getting old and I am a paranoid about getting a new one.

Regarding the undesirable genes, my dad dealt me a crappy hand of DNA. I was gifted psoriasis, a possible blood clotting disorder, and anxiety. Thanks again, Dad! I developed dry, scaly patches of skin on my elbows and knees at the age of ten. The patches of dry skin started out small, but slowly grew in size and number as I got older. Psoriasis is a chronic auto-immune disease and an inflammatory condition that I will never grow out of. Complications from a tonsillectomy, which left me anemic and in and out of surgery multiple times, illuminated the possibility that I might have Von Willebrand disease due to my potential inability to clot normally. I lost so much blood at one point that I almost needed a blood transfusion, but thankfully I only ended up needing two iron infusions instead. Even after multiple blood tests, the doctors still couldn't give me a definitive answer. I may or may not have a blood clotting disorder. It had taken me almost two months to recover after my initial surgery. I had lost almost twenty pounds since I couldn't eat anything more than orange sherbet, ice cream, mashed potatoes, or apple sauce. As for the anxiety, it plagues me everyday. I worry about things to the point of exhaustion. Anxiety prevents me from doing a lot of things in my life and I've only recently started to get a handle on it.

Almost everything in my life seems to abide by Murphy's Law. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." It might sound ridiculous, but most of the time I can tell when things aren't going to work out. If I'm doing something new or trying something different, I get a feeling that something will go wrong. Things don't work out the way I plan. I get overlooked or left out. Apparently, I am easy to forget. I rip my brand new athletic pants in front of the track coach and half of the track team. Food gets delivered to the wrong house. Food doesn't get delivered at all. Orders don't go through or get mixed up. My name gets mispronounced. I don't get taken seriously. I've been ghosted by more people than I can count. I get IDed buying scratch-off lottery tickets when I'm twenty-four years old (In front of my mom, I might add. She thought it was hysterical). The one day I finally decide to sign up for Planet Fitness, the location I want to go to is closed due to electrical issues. These things only happen to me and I just laugh. I am the unluckiest person I know.

I know things could be much worse. Sometimes I just have to look back and laugh at all of the stupid things that have happened in my life, and recognize that most of these things are comical in hindsight. I didn't chronicle these things to gain pity or sympathy. I've listed them because I've learned to laugh at myself and I appreciate self-deprecating humor. I am fortunate enough to have been raised in a family that finds laughter in almost anything, even on days that are taken over by sadness. I grew up in a household where jokes, laughs, and smiles occurred daily. Everyone constantly makes fun of each other and laughs at themselves, all in good fun. I do not think I have gone a day without laughing.

I am truly an April Fool.