Magic Tricks

Whenever your Mom meets an expecting mother or someone who has recently gone through the life-transforming event that is labor, she excitedly shares your birth story. She spares no details, good and bad.
Rai, you may know by now that your grand entrance into the outside world was not a seamless and pain-free one, for you or your mother. You both had to endure some trauma in order to get you out of the womb and into the world.
Months have passed so it is easy to joke and laugh about the ordeal now but, thinking back on it, I now know why the innocent story of the stork delivering the baby was first created. I can't imagine an account of childbirth that is any further from the reality than that one and that is precisely the purpose of this age-old story: get everyone thinking about anything but the truth. There's something to be said for ignorance, especially the self-imposed kind.
Last weekend, while walking around, we came across one of those images on the street with the heads cut out for photo opportunities and we came up with another childbirth story that may catch on: the story of how babies are pulled out of top hats... like magic!