Tuesday's Child

At my cousin's baby shower, we played a party game where we filled in the missing words of nursery rhymes. One of the items was, "_____ child is full of grace."

I knew the answer to that. In fact, I was the only one who knew the answer to that. People probably wondered how I knew. I knew because that nursery rhyme scarred me for life.

When I was a wee lass, my mother bought a big book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes for her children. In fine British fashion, there were rhymes about horrible natural disasters like the plague and the burning of the London bridge. There were also nonsensical rhymes about talking bells, lambs that follow schoolgirls everywhere they go, and three men of various professions adrift in a tub on the sea. And then there were the moralistic rhymes, the ones that seemed determine to teach children some kind of important lesson.

One rhyme was about the days of the week. It told you about yourself based on the day you were born, like a stuffy British horoscope. Here's the entirety:
Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace;
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go;
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for its living;
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

Of course, I went to my mother and asked her what day I was born on. It turned out that I was born on a Tuesday.

A Tuesday? Me, full of grace? I've never been graceful. Videos of me dancing as a four-year-old accurately portray me as a giddy colt with no sense of physical awareness.

Finding out that I was born on a Tuesday and must either be graceful or fail to live up to my stuffy British horoscope was one of the bitterest disappointments of my life. It was worse when I found out that all four (at the time) of my siblings were born on a Sunday. All of them. They were supposed to be paragons of perfection. I was supposed to be, eh, light on my feet.

I was profoundly affected by this unfairness. For years and years, I felt much put-upon.

Then Baby Brother was born...on a Wednesday.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Finally, someone who is worse off than I am!