If my mother were alive, I’d be blaming her right to her face. But she’s not. Alas, she departed this earthly realm years ago – departed, no doubt, just to escape being blamed by her sons for their odd and abundant ailments.

 

My brother and I, you see, were born fragile flowers. We were born falling apart. We were born with bodies certainly not meant for the contact sports we loved, or even for anything as strenuous and perilous as walking or, heaven help us, sleeping.

 

Early on in our expeditions through assorted emergency wards, various perplexed doctors -- trying to seize any possible explanation as to why one of my brother’s Achilles tendons severed when he was simply approaching the net during a volleyball game (while the other vulnerable tendon snapped while he was climbing stairs), or why my lung collapsed one night while I was sleeping – would gravely note the distinct possibility of our problems being rooted in birth defects. Ah-ha, we’d suspected as much!

 

My mother would vehemently disagree, of course. All her progeny were born perfect, and certainly sans anything as ignominious and disagreeable as defects.

 

Recently my brother and I found ourselves comparing current battle scars. Or birth defects. His personal posse of physiotherapists and chiropractors and medical moguls had recently been treating him for an inexplicable pulled groin, knee pain, tender calf and buggered back, while my formidable team had been treating me for a popped shoulder (again, apparently sustained while sleeping), a tender knee, and recurrent sinus woes. Oh, to boot, an acupuncturist had been seen pinning me down on a weekly basis for digestive defects. Defects I’ve had, no doubt, since birth.

 

Well, as if that nonsense wasn’t more than enough, the other morning I awoke with a tender elbow. Tender for no logical reason, I might add. Later in the day, while hoisting a particularly heavy pot of pasta off the stove, utilizing that very tender arm joint, I completely blew out the elbow, to the point where I can no longer pick my nose or, worse, lift a latte. For the record, it was not – as one wise-ass friend wondered – elbow pasta.

 

Now luckily, the pot, the pasta and the boiling water, landed back on the stove and not on me. And luckily only the hounds were on hand to hear my howled curses. And luckily this unfathomable elbow blowout did not occur during golf season. I can’t even begin to imagine the grief I’d get when fellow golfers discovered I was put on the DL (disabled list) on account of a boiling pasta incident. On account of but another birth defect.

 

You know, they say what comes around goes around. Just as my brother and I forever blamed our poor mother for our assorted birth defects, my children have taken to blaming me for all their various ailments. They blame me for everything from their oddball aches to their oddball anxieties, spouting off about these ailments being built into their genes. Nonsense.

 

Be rational, I tell them. If you feel compelled to blame someone, blame your dearly departed grandmother. I mean, she started this whole birth defect thing, not me.

 

Ah, more fragile flowers. More babes born falling apart.