Six Years A Child - The Story of My Conception

Age 6 was an interesting year for me. It was the year 2000, not much had changed but we lived under water, some bloke went on a space odyssey and my parents clearly just stopped giving a fuck. The first signs of this were small enough. One evening they sat me down at the dinner table and told me we were going to watch their favourite film (that was also turning 6 that year): Pulp Fiction. The one catch was that there was one scene they were going to skip entirely, to save my innocent young mind. We lit the fire, got wine and orange juice (guess which one was for me) and sat down to watch Tarantino’s masterpiece. Pulp Fiction remains one of my favourite films to this day, but at age 6 as Bruce Willis mounted a motorbike, said “Zed’s Dead” and the credits rolled, I was nothing besides incredibly confused. “What were ye going to skip?” I innocently asked my parents, only for them to fall about the place with laughter, having forgotten to skip the Marcellus Wallace basement scene. While this is funny, and a bit fucked up, it’s not the main event of the fucked up card that was my 6th year on this planet.Fast forward a few relatively uneventful months...in saying that, I was 6; the most eventful thing that a 6 year old usually does is play football in schoolyard and watch Pokemon, so if you’re wondering what I’m skipping...that. Anyway, one night while eating moussaka, the traditional Celtic Tiger family dinner, I asked my parents where babies come from. They looked at each other, nodded solemnly and stood up. Walking me into the hallway, they pointed at a spot on the floor outside our spare room. This wasn’t where all children came from, I was told: it was where I came from.So now you’re probably thinking: “Jaysus, that’s a bit weird, but it’s not too fucked up.” Well first off, yes it kind of is a bit fucked up, but you can also see that this article didn’t end there. We left the scene of my conception, walked back to the table and my parents began to tell me the tale of how I was made. If you want a quick preview, my mother’s birthday and mine are just about 9 months apart. Apparently my mum came in from work to find my father with flowers, chocolates and nothing else. There was no time to get a condom, no time to go beyond the hallway and no time to take off my mother’s soaking wet trenchcoat. Apparently my father was a prolific lover, and so roughly 9 months and thirty minutes later, out pops Baby Me.I struggle to process this information now writing this, so you can imagine how I took it then. Actually, looking back, I took it rather well. I didn’t know that Santa wasn’t real, but I did know where, when and for how long my parents rode to make me. I presumed this passing of information was a normal parent-child exchange, and didn’t know otherwise until talking to someone on a date in college. They didn’t believe me so, of course, the only natural course of action was to bring them home, show them the spot and introduce them to my parents. Nevertheless, that relationship didn’t last long. What will last long is the memory of that day, the image born of that conversation with my parents, and the crippling alcoholism to try and forget both of the former.