“Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe.
Thursdays child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.”
I was born on a Wednesday. Now, with that said, I have to state that Wednesdays scare the shit out of me. Really, they do. I know what you’re doing: you’re snickering, scoffing, scorning. You’re thinking: how could she be scared of something as ambiguous as a day? I guess I should clarify myself and my fear. I do not actually fear Wednesdays. I fear that which happens on Wednesdays and that could be anything. Just the idea that the next dawning day will be the third one of the week creates a feeling of panic within me. It leaves my chest heaving, my breath quickening, and my palms sweaty.
On Tuesday nights while I pull my blankets up close around my ears I pray to God that this Wednesday won’t be one of the ones that leaves me running to the white porcelain god, sweat drenching my forehead as I attempt to throw up the stress that has tangled my stomach. Instead, I hope it will be one of the good ones that leave my smile at a constant beam no matter what happens the rest of the week. Or, better yet, maybe this Wednesday nothing significant will happen at all! Then I could relax the tension that builds up my back, through my shoulders, into my head.
You see, my being born on a Wednesday wasn’t even the beginning. My mom was also born on a Wednesday, and although I might not have inherited her ability to tan as if I were a Mexican or play softball with the best of ‘em, I did inherit her Wednesday luck. And let me tell you, I would much rather have the darker skin complexion then a regularly scheduled anxiety attack about the future.
It all started three summers ago: my first boyfriend and I officially became an item and officially disbanded said item on a Wednesday. I was never in love with him. However, being dumped for the first time by anyone has its sentimental value. I guess you could say it was a nice big leap into womanhood for me. Unfortunately, it was not to be the last step. For the rest of that grueling summer things such as: fights between friends, arguments with my dad over my independence, and a general shift from being a kid to living as an adult just seemed to always happen on that one day of the week.
At first I seemed to imagine it. Were all those fights between me and my father taking place on Wednesdays? And so what if they were? There isn’t anything interesting about that. Yet, my intuitive “feelings” kept poking me in the stomach on Wednesday mornings as if to warn me that something interesting just might happen that day. Whenever I pointed this out to my friends they would give me that sarcastic-what-is-she-talking-about-now look then tell me to shut my mouth and turn the volume up on the car stereo. Clearly, they were not staunch supporters of my hypothesis. And neither was I…yet.
The clincher wasn’t to happen until October 11, 2006, on you guessed it, a Wednesday. It was the time of night when you can see the bats darting from tree branches and into the wild, where the stars seem to shine unnaturally bright, despite the cumulous clouds in the distance. The moon was wavering down on us and our breathing created small clouds of our own that seemed to dance around our lips. I nudged closer into his embrace as he seemed to be the only source of heat. Sitting out on Will’s front porch, I could feel my skin tingle with both the cold and the excitement that was mixing inside of me. I was falling in love with my best friend and he was asking me to be his. Nothing else had ever made the Universe feel so right.
The next morning I woke up with a smile on my face. I just couldn’t help it, and anyone who has been head over heals in love knows the sensation of giddiness that seems to act as a cocoon keeping you safe and warm against all the bad in the world. I could not stop replaying the events of the previous night in my head. I walked over to my calendar where I record everything and put a big circle on the date…suddenly it struck me where I was circling…Wednesday. And there it hit me. Everything happens on a Wednesday.
I began to think back: what else in my life had happened on that particular day?
Well, I had become a woman—that was a lovely red Wednesday surprise. I learned much later that my parent’s divorced on Wednesday, June 5 of 1991. And of course that horrible day in fifth grade, when sitting next to my sister at a play production of Tom Sawyer I sat horrified as my grandfather—the big, tough, shouts at everybody, he’s right and you’re wrong, end of story, now pour him a glass of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey and Sprite, the only father figure I had known up to that point—had a stroke right before my eyes.
Interesting enough, these reflections did not develop my fear just then. It actually happened almost a month later. In November, when the leaves had finally fallen off the trees, and you could smell ham in the air from the Smithfield Packing Plant down the street, my sister and I had what we have since deemed: “The Week from Hell.” Anything and everything that could possibly go wrong happened to one or the other of us that week: speeding ticket, check; run over a deer while driving my dad’s van because I had already driven my car into a ditch, check; work at night by yourself at a store and get robbed at gun-point, yup, we had that too. Ironically, the only day of that week that nothing bad did happen was on a Wednesday. It seemed God took pity on us and granted us safety, at least for that one day.
That is how the fear began. You see, if it was only ever something bad that happened on Wednesdays I could handle that. But it’s not. It’s the fact that I just don’t know. I wake up in the mornings panicked, unsure, just scared. For ever since then, I’ve learned to keep my guard up. Things seem to just happen and for better or worse, it’s on a Wednesday.
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