My children asked me once why I am the way I am. So I told them. One day, shortly after my first child was born, I came across an old lamp in a bundle of baby clothes. I wiped the lamp off, and a genie appeared and offered me three wishes. “But,” the genie added, “your wishes will come with a cost.”
That was okay, I thought. I’d do anything for my children. “Oh genie,” I said, “please give my daughter beautiful blue eyes.”
“Your wish is granted,” said the genie. Over the coming weeks friends and family would all remark on what gorgeous eyes my daughter had, a clear blue like the afternoon sky in August. But the very next morning, I woke up and everything looked blurry. By the end of the day my optometrist had prescribed me a pair of thick glasses.
I determined not to use the genie any more, but I kept the lamp. And several years later, when my second child was born, I found it again. The genie reminded me that I had two more wishes. “But,” the genie added, “your wishes will come with a cost.”
Sighing, I realized that I could hardly do less for my second child than for my first, so I said, “Oh genie, please give my son beautiful golden hair.”
“Your wish is granted,” said the genie. Over the coming months friends and family would all remark on what gorgeous hair my son had, blond ringlets that fell neatly without tangling. But the very next morning, I woke up and noticed I could feel a breeze on my head. I put on my glasses, looked in the mirror, and found I had gone bald.
This time I swore I would never ask anything of that genie again, and I threw the lamp into the farthest corner of the garage in a box of stuff I’d been avoiding sorting out for a decade. But several years passed again, and my third child was born. I wasn’t entirely surprised when, the day after we brought her home from the hospital, somehow I came across that lamp again.
“You have one remaining wish,” the genie told me. “But your wish will come with a –”
“A cost, yeah I know,” I said. In truth, I was a bit older by this point, and I felt a little bad that I’d used my earlier wishes for superficial things like hair and eyes. And here was my chance to make up for that.
“Genie,” I said, “I wish for my youngest, my baby girl, to be smart.”
“Your wish is granted,” said the genie. Over the coming years, friends and family would all remark on how smart my youngest daughter was. She was the first to read in her preschool, and took to math like a fish to water. But the very next morning, I woke up and noticed that my bedroom seemed to have a lot more blue and red and grey than I’d remembered. I put on my glasses to see clearly, and I realized, to my horror,
I was a New England Patriots fan.
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