My wife asked me recently what time of the day I was born. I told her I didn't know and asked her why she wanted to. She didn't answer, but I'm guessing it was for some kind of Thai astrological purpose. She told me to ask my mom when I was born, and so I did.
My mom told me the time and said she went to the hospital that day to have labor induced because I was "too lazy to emerge" on my own since she had probably made it too cozy for me "on the inside." I wasn't born until twelve hours later. This got me to thinking.
I've been late to do a lot of things that most people do much earlier in their lives, and I suppose this could be construed as laziness. But I think it's probably more attributable to fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. Fear of failure.
I've always been afraid--unusually afraid, I think--to step outside the comfort zone of my routines. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that I feel inadequate, and rightfully so, for meeting the adaptive challenges of change. I've learned over the decades that I don't handle change well, because it takes me longer than most, if not forever, to figure out my new circumstances and develop a way to deal with them effectively.
But I'm thinking my fear of change might not be only a learned tendency but also an innate one, one that was programmed into my genes or into my basic biology in some other way and that began expressing itself when it was time for me to face one of the biggest changes one ever faces in life--the change of being born, and I somehow resisted.
I can't help but wonder if any research has been done or might be done that investigates what if any relationship there might be between the length of a woman's labor and the resistance of her offspring to changes throughout life.
