My Problem With Authority

I started thinking today about the past 30 years. One thing occurred to me: my entire life, right down to the moment of my birth, has been about defying convention and authority. In truth, I'm convinced that the problem with authority is genetic. See, I was born 30 years ago today, and I am aware that it was to two people who had problems accepting the status quo. So, below is a list of things that lead up to me, and what was expected to happen.

My father had problems with the entire concept of convention. When most people who grew up when he did knew that they would be married once, that was clearly a sign to him that divorce and infidelity was an option. He was married four times (that the family knows of), and for a while, two of those marriages was concurrent. The Christian faith says to marry once, the Islamic faith says that polygamy is accepted. He was born and raised Christian. He met his concurrent wife (at the time) while in an Islamic nation. The entire time he was married, to all of his wives, he clearly had no problems with potentially leaving a few other genetic markers around. Officially, I am his fifth child and only known son. Unofficially, I am his only known son, but that could be an entirely different matter in truth as he clearly had his share of mistresses. Dad, thanks for defying convention. And then, for your fourth (known) marriage, you had to go out and find my mother. Oh, and when most men have given up on reproduction, you conceived me in your 57th year, and I was born just short of your 58th.

My mother was always too darned smart for her own good. She was four when she started first grade. She ended up being the only daughter of her parents who fled the authority of the Chinese cultural revolution and ended up in the Dutch-Islamic colony of Indonesia. And then, with a mother that had converted to Islam, she managed to grow up Catholic. Oh, and if that wouldn't defy convention enough, you had to marry this American.

Now, when most people talk about jungle fever, they think of interracial cross-pollination. Nope, not only did my parents who came from two entirely different cultures, but two entirely different socio-economic backgrounds, meet, they met in the jungles of East Kalimantan or what is commonly known as Borneo. Yep, I am a direct result of a nasty and horribly literal case of jungle fever.

Then of course, is the fact that I was scheduled to be born on Christmas day. In fact, I was scheduled to be the fourth generation in a row on my mother's direct line to be born on Christmas. Oops. I clearly decided that being born on that day wouldn't do. Also, I would have been the only male born of that line to be born on that day. Yep, that clearly wouldn't do either. So while convention would have dictated that I would have either been born in Asia or the States, I had to be born three days early and in Europe. Oh, and while most are born either by Caesarian or in a completely natural way, I had to be induced. Apparently, the extra three days without being induced would have been quite fatal to my mother. Then of course, after I was born, she made the decision that though I was born to carry two passports as a subject of the Queen and as an American, she insured that I would carry only an American passport. Of course, mother would insist that I speak Oxford at home, even though I was being reared in the states.

I gotta tell you, thirty years of defying convention and authority is clearly in my blood. Yup, I attribute all of it to my unconventional circumstances. May the next thirty years be just as odd.