Once upon a time I had a picture of my mom chugging a can of PBR and flipping off the camera (no joke).  Unfortunately I couldn’t find it, so I think this picture is a hot 2nd place on the “Kevin, I’m going to fucking kill you” scale.

About a month ago, I finally learned that I was a mistake.  During a conversation about how women with ticking timebombs for biological clocks terrify me, she offered up some reassurance: “Not all women really have the urge to have children.  I didn’t really ever have the urge.  I was getting my degree when I suddenly became pregnant with you and we just decided to roll with it.”  “So I was a mistake?”  “Oh, mmmm, yeah.”

I had known that my youngest sister was a mistake since forever ago.  I was teasing her one day in my youth, “you really think you were planned?  Get pregnant 6 months after I was born?  On Valentine’s Day?”  When confronted, my mom volunteered: “You were a planned mistaken.”  “Planned?!”  “Well, we planned to have another kid, just not quite then.”  I really hope being bad at birth control isn’t hereditary.

Anyways, the reason I share this is because my mom was about a year away from getting her Ph.D, was a professor at Smith College and still “decided to roll with it.”  She had a lot to lose.  Hell, if I were married to a woman that close to getting tenure and a Ph.D, I would have kicked her down the stairs so she could go be the breadwinner and I could just still around, drink beer, watch Hulu, and keep this blog updated.  But yeah, my mom gave up her pursuit of a Ph.D and ultimately tenure to raise my ass.  I think that’s pretty big.