On February 18, 2014, my "little sister" Jan turned 40 years old. Tomorrow, Saturday, 02-22-14, my parents and I are driving to Eau Claire to help her celebrate with about 30 of her closests friends. It doesn't seem that long ago that I celebrated my own 40th birthday and graduation from graduate school at the same time. I had set a personal goal that I wanted to have my Master's Degree by the time I turned 40, and I accomplished that goal by approximately 8 days. That was when I developed my first-ever "five year plan" which was to apply to a PhD program by my 45th birthday and start that program in the fall of 2016 after I turned 45 in May, 2016. So far I have done some preliminary research on what doctorate programs I would be most interested in, and my interests tend to lean toward forensic psychology, which equals two years of law school and three years of psychology. So if I start a five year program when I'm 45 years old, I'd complete it at age 50 and then would need to work until approximately age 70 just to make it worth the time and effort I put into it my current age of 42. That seems like a long time into the future, and I've never been the type that creates goals so far in advance; I'm more of a day-by-day person, which is somewhat unusual for someone with my perfectionist personality type.
Regardless of my "own stuff", the point is that my sister has already turned 40 years old, which kind of freaks me out as the oldest of three children. I don't remember Jan's birth. I was not yet three years old when she came along and scientifically, people cannot remember anything before approximately age five; if you dispute that fact, I will refer you to my Research and Evaluation instructor from my graduate class who is all about statistics, "hard science" and valid research which overwhelmingly establishes that humans cannot remember anything prior to age five. As proof, he provided his own "memories" from the car ride home at three days after his birth and everything he reported to "remember" about the trip, his parents disputed. Plus, there's a butt-load of research that indicates that the human brain is incapable of remembering details of experiences prior to age five, given how the human brain develops.
So most of my memories of Jan's infancy are related to her being placed in a pelvic brace and cast due to a hip dislocation at the time of her birth. All of parents' offspring were born in a breach position. I was born in 1971, my sister in 1974 and my brother in 1976. This was long before ultrasounds determined the sex and position of the fetus, so all three of us were born in the "breech position" which comes down to instead of us being delivered face down, head first position, we were all born "butt first", face up, which isn't the ideal position to be in when one is being born. Due to what I and my mom believe to be basic incompetence from the general practitioner who delivered my sister and brother, my sister was born with a "dislocated hip" because, again this is just my opinion, the MD had to "pull" her out of our Mom's birth canal and in order to make that process easier, given that my sister was in a breach position, he pulled one of her legs forward to make the delivery a bit easier. This resulted in her hip being dislocated. She spent her first months of life in a plaster cast and after that she was in a brace that kept her legs/pelvis from developing normally. Regardless of the photos my parents have of my sister in her cast and brace, I do remember her being in the brace. To this day, she uses a "lift" in one of her shoes as one of her legs is approximately 1 1/2 to 2 inches longer than the other.At times she has seen a chiropractor regularly and used a "lift" in one of her shoes.
So tomorrow, I will be a part of the celebration of the 40th celebration of her birth, because, I only have one "little sister" regardless of her chronological age.
