The Second Hand Man

Today was Labor Day again!

Well, for my mother, that is. She went into labor at around 04h00 and at 14h20 the new family member arrived - four days later than expected – and sans a very special piece of equipment.

Yep, to my (and mine alone) shock and surprise, and to my father’s clearly discernable disappointment, Claude has turned out to be Claudia. The brother I was expecting is, in fact, a sister.

My unintentional pun of October 10 has come to pass. When I said, ‘I hope nothing is amiss,’ it should, in fact, have been, ‘I hope nothing is a miss.’

It didn’t take me long to figure out the reason for Claude’s unforeseen sex change.

In retrospect it all makes crystal clear sense, yet was still something totally unexpected.

The adult male ejaculates, on average, about 5ml of semen during copulation and each ml contains about 60 million sperm cells. Yet, only a single one of these is capable of fertilizing the female egg cell. Once fertilization takes place, a chemical reaction is produced that automatically prevents any other sperm cells from entering the egg or ovum.

Think of it as winning the biggest lottery ever. Each and every human upon the face of the earth is only here because the single sperm that initially caused them to become what they are today beat 300 million others in a dash to fertilize their mother’s egg cell.

So, next time you think that you’re unlucky when it comes to having your number picked, just remember that you won the greatest and most important race of your life before you were even born.

Every human on this planet is a big, big winner.

I have somehow damned Claude to some sort of strange oblivion by my presence back in the past. Who knows what happened the night my mother was fertilized. Did my father get into bed earlier or later that night because of me? Whatever the reason, it was inevitable that this time round Claude’s little sperm cell would lose the race. This time, it was Claudia who reached the finish line first, and now I have a sister that I have never known. A female now exists in this timeline where previously there had not. What consequences, dire or beneficial, will this cause?

Only Time will tell!!!

Perhaps it is also better that it happened this way, for if my mother had given birth to a boy, it would most likely not have been the same Claude anyway, and it may have been some time before I even realized it.

I never had a sister before. This will take some getting used to.

Being Claude’s elder brother, I taught him many of the guy things he needed to know.

What the hell do I know about girly stuff?

And girly magazines ain’t gonna help squat!!!