Family taboo: My name is Jamie (not my real name). I was eighteen when I had my son Alex. But my birthing coach (my mother) also went into labor while helping me to breath. This meant my baby oops sister named Alexi was born on exactly the same day as Alex, only eight hours apart. My mother thought it would be great fun to raise the two newborns not as Aunt and Nephew, but instead as “twins”. Personally I think my mother was just tired of raising babies and effectively gave me my baby sister to raise.
While their birth certificates were correct with the right mothers listed the town promptly forgot the truth and always saw Alex and Alexi as fraternal twins. Alex and Alexi even fondly called each other “Brother” and “Sister” while growing up.
When both children graduated High School at fifteen and literally tested out as geniuses, it only made sense to me to send my baby sister and my son to the same college together. I knew they would eventually go to different universities as they pursued their Post Graduate studies, but for now I felt that because they were so young going to college, that it would be reassuring for them to have something familiar in their life.
My solution was to buy them a three bedroom condo within walking distance of the University… Yes, I bought them a condo verses letting them live in the dorm.
I won’t bore you with the financial details, but let’s say that I am that same famous “Baby Jamie” you once watched for a week on the news. For those who might not know the story, as a four year old child, I fell into an old water well. If that wasn’t bad enough, the well walls promptly collapsed on top of me. They say it took two days for them to dig me out and by the time I was out of the hospital, I had magically become the benefactor of a trust fund worth millions of dollars.
Apparently moms from all around the world felt sorry for little baby Jamie and sent me a few dollars to help me in my recovery. Over the last thirty years the trustees of my special trust had invested and reinvested my fortune to make the trust now worth nearly eighty million dollars. While growing up rich for a farm girl, being from Smith County North Dakota, a hundred grand a year was considered a lot of clams. By the time I was twenty one, I had learned to live on only 10% of the actual interest that was earned for that year (typically around $600,000). That’s a lot of lettuce for any farm girl, so the money was used each year to buy real-estate and farm land.
Anyway my trustee’s said it was a real good investment to just buy a condo near the college because it provided almost no risk of not getting my money back out of it. Let’s face it, even if I didn’t have a lot of money, I would still know that there was always a shortage of places to live in a University town. Reselling the condo after a few years was just not going to be a problem.
Alex was a senior and anxious to get back to the University after Christmas break because he had a wrestling tournament in a few days. The problem was that all the local weathermen had predicted they were expecting a full blown North Easter Blizzard for New Year’s Eve.