Not of This Earth

My name is Jo, and I’m the first person not born on Earth.

If you’ve been around for the past twenty years, you’ve heard of me. But for the unaware observer, I’ll go over the Cliff’s notes for you.

My mom was an Astronaut on the third long haul habitation trip to Mars. Lucky enough for her there had been enough trips so far that the habitation gets a little bigger, every time they bring more supplies, they build new structures, and improve the habitation of the planet. I think when my mom was stationed on Mars, there must have been at least 10 structures at the base, and enough medical equipment to perform anything from stitches to open heart surgery in the most dire case. Of course you’d have to be lucky enough to be stationed with someone with a background in both Cardiology and Astro physics, which as far as I know, is a rare occurrence. Unlucky for my mom there didn’t happen to be an OB/GYN currently residing on the same planet as her. Actually no one with more than the ability to stitch a wound, let alone deliver a baby, cut an umbilical cord, remove a placenta, perform a cesarian section while avoiding mass murder in the process.

And no; before you start to think that my birth was planned, it wasn’t. I know every other country assumed this was some malicious planned take-over, I deeply apologize for my part in all of those nuclear threats, but I was a baby, alright? It did lead to unintended affect that I am the first official native inhabitant of Mars. The Eve of a new civilization, the dawn of a new era, if you mind. And to some people, the rightful heir to the planet, the shiny green eminence. A pretty decent claim to a throne, in my personal opinion. Everyone alive knows something about me, a lot of people know everything that’s ever happened to me. Kids do book reports on my life. Little girls dress up as me for Halloween; they wear princess dresses with a crown but they paint their faces green and wear green pipe cleaners on their heads to look like antennae. Yeah, you bet the Martian comparison stuck. They tried to “Carrie” me at my senior prom, but instead of pigs blood they filled a bucket with green slime. The morons also didn’t consider how to actually drench me since our school didn’t elect a prom Queen, they chickened out and by the end of the night just threw a bucket of dark green mucus on the limo I was in. It was the worst attack tactic I’ve ever seen, I could hear them giggling about it all night, one particularly brain-dead football star even walked up to me and asked if I had seen “the alien chick” around because they were totally going to “get her”. I just told him that I saw her by the stage a minute ago.

But no, this wasn’t an intended birth. It was an affair with another married Astronaut on Mars. My mom had only been on the planet for about six months when she was finally convinced that she was pregnant. At first she thought maybe the drastic climate change had delayed her period, or maybe something to do with the gravity difference. It was finally undeniable when she started showing, a little plump bump, the first sign of new life. The rest of the story she really doesn’t like to talk about. The way she remembers it is being a lot of years of being bullied on a space station, threatened with the end of her career. But by the time that I had been delivered safely without so much as a nurse or someone to gently hold her hand, most of the scientists on the base had come around, and welcomed the new adventure. That’s how scientists saw it, a “new adventure”, an experiment they wanted their names to be included on. The first person born on Mars. They were no longer just a part of the team that helped construct the livable habitat on another planet, they were the first generation that saw a living, breathing, alien. That was something they could get behind.

And that’s what I am I guess, an alien. I do have an American passport though, but my birth certificate says ‘Bartholomew Space Station, MARS’.

I’ve met my father a few times in my life, well during my life on Earth anyway. It’s hard to maintain a successful father-daughter relationship when you spend half of your life on a different planet than him. I think the most surprising part about my extra-terrestrial conception is that the only person to lose their job was my father. Shortly after my birth he was summoned back to Earth via an unscheduled trip, no explanation, I’m not sure what type of honourable or dishonourable discharged he faced back in Texas. The last time I saw him I met with him for coffee in the East Village, and I really felt bad for him. I could see the way that years of embarrassment of failure dragged at his skin as if invisible fishhooks were keeping him tethered to this secondary planet. How strange it is that I was able to live out his dream, everything he worked toward in his life, when you think about it, was taken away by me, for me. I spent the first ten years of my life on Mars, learning from the world’s best scientists and explorers, while he was sent back to a rancher in the country with squeaky floors, too close to the nearest highway. I felt this every time I see him, but I really haven’t thought about it any other day of my life.

However the human inexperience has caused me to fail publicly at some of my darkest moments. Or maybe it’s not the humanness that haunts me, but the person that I became on that other planet, that I can’t seem to find here.