For my psychology of life span and human development class we had to write out our birth stories as if it was being told as a story and in it explain how the events surrounding our birth impacted us. And I just wanted to share it with you:

Sixteen short days after 9/11/2001, a couple of school teachers -- the husband being a former circus juggler, though that information will not be pertinent until later -- went to the hospital to deliver their third and final daughter. They named their child “Rose”, after her great-grandmother. When friends and family would visit the new baby and her mom, they would bring bouquets of roses; the father joked saying “if I had known people would give us what we named her, I would have named her ‘One-Hundered Dollar Bill’”. 

The small town where they lived was in the middle of the worst drought it had ever experienced. Due to the drought, the nurses kept the wife in the hospital for extra days so that she could have access to plenty of water for her and the new born baby. The husband chose to sleep on a cot in the hospital every night so that he could stay with her. While staying the nights in the hospital brought great comfort to his postpartum wife, the husband began to feel antsy and wanted to get some exercise to decrease his boredom. He began by going for a short walk around the parking lot. As he circled back around he saw his van and remembered he had juggling machetes with him -- because as you will remember, he was once a circus juggler. He excitedly grabbed these because he knew juggling would be the perfect way to drain some of his extra energy. 

Once the husband found a shady patch of grass, he began throwing his knives in the air and enjoyed the exercise. He sure thought he was putting on quite the performance for the people watching out windows. The people watching out their windows however, were not entertained. The nurses began getting phone calls to the front desk from people who were very afraid of what they were seeing. With it being barely two weeks after the nation experienced the terrorist attack of 9/11, it only made sense that this six-foot-something man who was throwing 20-inch machetes was a terrorist too. The wife heard of this terrifying man attacking the hospital, and she laughed since she knew it was just her husband juggling. She explained this to the nurses, and when they were assured there was no danger, they chuckled at this misunderstanding as well. 

Growing up as the child of a juggler, the kid did not understand why people were ever shocked, amazed, or even scared when he would juggle knives. When the kid heard her birth story, she never could grasp how the people watching from the windows could jump to such extreme conclusions so quickly. This child was not born when 9/11 happened; she had no memories of this event, so she never understood how terrified the entire nation was at that time. Infact, because she was born after 9/11, she was taught about it in school and learned to view it as if it were ancient history.