i was born on 29 feb 1972 in a city called "Katrineholm" that is in in Sweden.
my father was 19 years old and my mother was 15 years old.
my mother was studying in a conservatorium of musical studies at the time, and my father was studying medicine at a university.
when my mother went into labor, my father took her to hospital rapidly on his motor bike.
they never made it, and i was born before my mother died so i am not organically damaged by anoxic experiences etc.
my mother died after giving birth to me.
my father died before i was born. i had no other real relatives because all parents of my parents were also dead (what a bleak situation)
so i went into an orphanage in sweden, and my step parents that came from australia wanted to adopt a boy (because they had 3 girls and my step mother then had to have a hysterectomy) , but they did not want to adopt a boy that would ever be able to trace his roots. they decided to adopt from outside australia.
so the "international red cross" had me on their books as an orphan in need of parentage.
my parents secured me for adoption (they were very successful and kind of impressive to the swedish authorities)
i was about 4 weeks old when i arrived in australia, so i have no accent or much knowelege about where i originated from. i am not interested.
i did not know i was adopted until the age of 15.
my family wanted to keep it a secret, and i never guessed.
but at 15, i was in a psychiatric institution, and the psychiatrist i had (dr russel white) thought that i may behave as i do because i knew i was adopted.
he was wrong, but he summoned my father and mother to a meeting where he thought he would expose the reason for my severe behaviours with his hypothesis that i always knew i was not really related to my family, and that was the reason i never gelled with them.
when we were at the meeting, it seemed grave because i did not know what was going to happen, and i never dreamed i was adopted.
then the doctor said to me: mark i have some very serious news for you.
i went into a meltdown immediately because i thought he was going to say my father (who i believed then, and still "feel" is my real father) was going to die.
when he told me that that was not the case, i calmed slightly and he told me i was adopted.
that was such a relief to me that my father (the one i loved and not my real one who died) was not going to die.
i was elated that the meeting just revealed that my genes are my own story which will never be told.
the reason i know the scant information about my real parents is because the special school i was in found an officer of the international red cross and tried to find as much out about me as they could.
then they told me.
i could not care less.
i am here and however i got here i do not care.
just think........your fathers load of sperm maybe had 20 million sperm cells in it, all swimming frantically toward the egg.
a race with 20 million contestants is hard to win.
if the sex cell from your father that is the father of your design did not win the seminal race, then you are not born.
if any other sperm cell in your fathers ejaculate fertilized your mothers egg, then a different person than you would have been born in your place.
so no matter how feeble anyone may feel that they are, it is the case that an almost infinite number of variable circumstances all happened in the eternal past that all fitted correctly to create YOU at the end of the line.
so the chain of good luck through the eons of time means that here you are in your healthy state(albeit temporary).
if one single aspect of eternal history was altered, you would not exist.
how very astronomically incalculable is the luck that you are alive and conscious?
it is hard to comprehend.