I'm My Own Grandma?

Okay, this may seem a little bizarre, but this Saturday Mark and I were out in Brighton for his uncle's wife's birthday -- he refuses to use the term Aunt because this is his uncle's second wife. Anyway, we got to talking about how all the people in the room were related. Somehow the Ray Stevens song "I'm My Own Grandpa" (actually not written by Ray Stevens, but that's the version I remember) came up. If you don't know the song, you can find it here.

I then commented that it's really going to get confusing when the time machine is invented and you can -literally- become your own Grandpa. Well, this stuck with me. I'm a big fan of Science Fiction, especially Sci-Fi with a comedic twist to it. I can remember several plot twists where this or something very similar happened. In Red Dwarf, Lister is actually his own father - he leaves himself (his son) in a cardboard box under a pool table millions of years in the past. In Futurama, Fry is his own grandpa due to a time-traveling love affair. There are many more examples.

This morning I started thinking about it, though. Why is it that these plot lines only exist with male characters? Well, there is the obvious biological reason that for a man to become their own grandpa requires a commitment short enough for a 30 minute television program, while for a woman to become her own grandma requires at least a nine month commitment. I don't think that it would be possible for a woman to contribute genetic material to her own makeup by accident.

However, I think that if a woman were bound and determined to be her own Grandma, she should have the right to do so! She does have a time machine, right? Well, all she has to do go back in time, find her grandfather, play hide the salami, and then she's done for about nine months of personal timeline. She could stay in the past and be her grandfather's first wife, she could go back to the future and do whatever it was she did there before she decided to change her birth identity, or she could just take the whole pregnancy off to travel without anyone knowing she was gone. Then, when the gestation cycle is complete, she would just have to go back to her grandpa, leave the baby in a basket on the porch and bang! Instant own-grandma status.

I think the problem is that it is quite easy, assuming one has a time machine, to really muck up one's personal ancestry, if one is male. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that a woman would have to be very deranged to become her own ancestor. Though I know where I'd go if I had a time machine... I'd go back and prove that there really was an Adam and Steve, and that Eve was just some insane woman from the 28th Century who really wanted to muck up the gene pool for all humanity.

Okay, so maybe it's time for a second cup of coffee before I head off to school.

Kind regards,

M.J.