Stories We’re Told About Ourselves

When I was a kid, our church pastor called me the miracle baby.

I remember sitting in the congregation during the service, staring at one of the stained glass windows. I loved those stained glass windows; they were abstract squares and rectangles, perfect for getting a good long trancelike gaze going while the pastor spoke. I would stare at them most Sunday mornings, trying to discern the grass and trees outside through the thick reds and blues of the glass.

Then I heard my name. The pastor was making a point during his sermon, and what he had said was, “Alison Headley and Hannah Smith, the miracle babies whom God saved because He has a special place for them in this world.”

Huh.

When I was six months old, I had a series of infant seizures that put me in the hospital for weeks and gave me a very high chance of growing up with severe physical and cognitive impairments. The Wikipedia article says the average infant with West Syndrome has 1 chance in 25 of developing normally, but my mother says that in my case it was more like 1 in 200-300. My parents assumed that once my seizures subsided, they’d have a child who would need full time care for the rest of her life.

But I did develop normally, and regular tests throughout my early childhood showed that I had very high intelligence. And that’s what made me the miracle baby, I guess: that I’d had all these seizures and turned out ok. No epilepsy, no developmental delays, nothing.

In church that day I concluded that God must have saved me for a specific purpose. Something major. Was I going to cure cancer? Establish world peace? Become President? Whatever He had planned for me must be huge, right? I couldn’t wait to see what I would achieve with my exceptional intelligence and God-boosted potential.

The first failing grade I ever got was in fourth grade handwriting. The handwriting unit was just about learning cursive and writing the same sentences over and over again in rows on the paper, a task so frightfully dull I physically couldn’t bring myself to complete it. Even thinking about doing that homework made my skin crawl with boredom. So I didn’t do it. On my report card that semester, in the Handwriting box it said: 40.

The teacher yelled at me. The guidance counselor yelled at me. My aunt called our house long distance and said, “So I heard you’re having trouble turning in your homework.”

My dad said, “You’re so smart, I don’t understand why you don’t apply yourself. Why didn’t you do your handwriting assignment?”

I answered truthfully: “I don’t know.” I was so disappointed in myself. Being too lazy to complete even basic fourth grade tasks was a complete waste of the miracle God had bestowed on me.

Things didn’t really get better. I couldn’t pay attention in class, and I forgot to do my homework all the time. Or sometimes even if I did do the homework, I would forget to turn it in. My grades were decent in my advanced classes, good enough to be allowed to do extra curriculars, but not good enough to cure cancer or establish world peace or even keep from getting yelled at and grounded when I got the occasional failing grade.

So maybe my miracle was going to be something else. Maybe I would be in the right place at the right time to save the life of the person who would go on to cure cancer. Or maybe I’d save a hundred people from the burning building of which I was the janitor, and then later the future President would have an office in that building and I would take out the trash in that office, saving the future President from the scourge of distracting clutter.

God had saved me, but He had chosen poorly, because I was fundamentally a lazy and ungrateful person. That was what everybody seemed to think, and anyway there was no other possible explanation for why I was so smart but didn’t apply myself. I was broken.

I would believe myself to be a lazy and ungrateful person from ages 9-42.

(Listen, I cannot overstate how much you should NOT tell a seven year old that she’s a miracle baby. Seriously, it fucked me up for a VERY long time. In college I decided I’m an atheist, and I never expected atheism to be so comforting. I don’t have a destiny? And all I have to do is be good to people and do my best and try to take care of the planet? Sign me the fuck up.)

(Hannah Smith was a little girl in our church who was born 3ish months premature; her chances of survival were poor but she ended up doing well. I should ask her if she had the same hangups I did.)