An excerpt from my memoirs

My earliest visual memory is of being in the womb: a warm red light all round me. I remember seeing a little pink hand with stumpy, finned fingers glowing in the light.

Around the same time had my first awareness of being a separate entity, of realising that the whole universe wasn’t me and I wasn’t the whole universe. Prior to this awareness of being separate I had a sense of oneness so total that concepts like ‘belonging’ or ‘connection’ seem heartbreakingly isolated in comparison.

* * *

I don’t remember anything about my birth. I was my parent’s first child, and the first grandchild on one side and the first legitimate and acknowledged grandchild on the other. I was born very early in the morning 6 December 1966, in Winnepeg, Manitoba, Canada. I imagine snow falling through the streetlights outside the hospital. While my mother laboured my father told her jokes, keeping her laughing so hard that the midwife wouldn’t believe her when she said she was ready to push. When she did check and see that I was immanent dad was banished to the waiting room until I had emerged, too soon for any interventions.