Your birthday: you don’t remember it (the day you were born, that is) although you were there, and you have to take other people’s word for it. Even a birth certificate is just somebody else’s word.
Your father: need I say more?
Your birthplace: same idea
Anything that took place in time before your first real memory: do you even remember when that was?
What are some other things about your very life and identity that you have to accept others’ word for?
If you have video evidence of things that happened to you before you first remember it, can you trust the photographer? The camera?
After further thought on this, even if you were breastfed and cared for by a female as a child, there’s no way you could know she was your mother. Wasn’t it Jack Nicholson (and many others for sure) who were raised by a woman they believed to be their biological mother only to learn later (if at all) that that was untrue?
Wouldn’t being breastfed be something else you’d have to rely on someone else to know? My own kids have asked if they were formula-fed, and I could have easily lied to them…they don’t remember nursing, and neither do I (when I was an infant, I do remember nursing my own children ;)).
I’ve been told by my mother that I had an atypical penicillin reaction. I was apparently a pretty pleasant toddler who would become extremely moody and just off the rails when given penicillin. My sister has a more traditional penicillin allergic reaction (hives), so the doctors in my youth didn’t bother giving me penicillin. Not to mention that a childhood friend was given penicillin when in the hospital, and had reactions that caused them to keep upping the penicillin dose, thinking it was an infection, until they went ‘uhoh, what if he’s allergic’ - he was really very sick from that.
These days, when I’m in a doctor’s office and describe the whole reasoning behind the penicillin thing, I get the :dubious: look. I’m vaguely worried that if I don’t report it, someday I might end up on penicillin and have an anaphylactic reaction.
Perhaps I was unclear. I look so much like my late father, that when we were leaving to go to my father’s funeral, my uncle, my late father’s older brother, got spooked when he saw me.
That I’m the father of my children. I have no reason to believe otherwise, except that it’s physically possible for my wife to have had an affair and birthed another’s children. Not that she did. Not that I suspect she did. She’s just physically capable of reproduction.
Any sort of technical readout or test result where I am not qualified to interpret the results (medical results, for one).
No, you weren’t unclear and I did appreciate the resemblance thing and now I can accept that you and your uncle don’t look anything alike.
But setting your own specific case aside and recognizing that when twins couple with twins and have twins as offspring that family resemblances can get pretty strange. Just this week I overheard on TV that some guy was talking about how his twin brother’s kids called him Uncle Daddy.
