Age: Just a Number (And Mine Keeps Changing!)

It's been a running joke with our teenagers. My real birthday is different from when my Birth Certificate, Passport and other official documentation claim I was born. If you or a loved one work for USCIS, you may stop reading now.

But really, I had no say in the decision to 'update', for a lack of a better word, (or from not wishing to blame my parents who simply wanted to give me the best start to life in their eyes) ... the date, month and year I joined this life as we know it. I was told there was a 'one year discrepancy' carefully designed to make up for the one year I sat school out due to a bad case of the Measeles. (Not that there is ever a good case of one)

So I went with it. I became a woman with two birthdays (and birthyears).

I would wait a little after making a new friend or intimate partner before owning this dirty little secret of mine. I probably confess the more dammning 'mistakes', traumas and insecurities and get those out of the way. Let that funk linger for a little bit while nursing my vulnerability hangover then hit them with the "My passport says I was born in Aug of 86, but in truth, I was born in OCT 85", when they least expected it. It worked for my overly self conscious self to titrate my collection of stories that made me look disadvantaged, hurt or simply 'bad'.

It was by far the hardest with my peers. My need to belong and please that was rather pathological meant I was deeply bothered by the fact that I was one year older than my classmates. I would not even openly admit it until much later in life. For some reason, I assumed it meant one more reason that made me less likely to be approved of, one more thing that made me inauthentic.

Things changed in my early 20's. In no particular order, I became a mom, my mental health took a nose dive, got divorced then remarried and my focus became self evaluation, healing, resilliance. The dreaded one year discrepancy bothered me less and less, It actually explained the many ways I acted a bit 'older' than my peers. Like that one time in middle school I had a crush on a boy who worked in his family's supermarket near the school. Word got out that I would go and sit in a cafe across from the shop every morning and none of my friends could understand what I was doing with my life. All their hormones would kick in soon after.

As my thirties rolled in and I worked on embracing all the intrecacies that made me this very person playing all the different notes in the symphony of life, I started enjoying getting older. I embracede and volunteered my having two birthdays freely but not in an effort to minimize my worth or claim victimhood. I enjoyed all the store coupons on August 8th and cake and candles with my loved ones on Oct 12th. I read Leo horoscopes for fun (also in an effort to figure my husband out) yet I Identified as a proud, balanced and at times confused Libra.

That new found acceptance was tested once more when just two weeks ago while on a call with my parents, they announced I was actually born in Oct 84 and that they lowered my age by 2 years to get me into the school they wanted for me. It took me no time to do the math and numbers aren't really my thing. So there was the reality, instead of turning 39 on Oct 12th 2024, should I decide to believe my parents this time, I would be welcoming in a new decade at 40 years old.

After kicking and screaming about it in our sibling group chat, asking as many people as I could who were breathing back then, enduring some lighthearted bullying from my husband and teenage kids, I sat down to journal about what I was truly experiencing in the hidden parts of my feelings about all of a sudden having been robbed off one calendar year from my life.

I was presented with the following emotions, included are the ways I validated the emotions for myself and how I reframed them, so I can be in full acceptance of being the chronolocally confused lead character in this tale of two birthdays.

1) Victimhood/ loss of control

"A modern woman living in a western society unsure about when she was born."

That entry was a painful update to the list of wounds I required no help in licking. "Was I so unwanted that nobody cared to keep a scrapbook or a freaking umblical cord? Being the last of 7 children born in the middle of a worldwide recognized famine into a family that already struggled to make ends meet, I couldn't refute the possibility that I was there by accident as opossed to being welcomed with excitement and desire.

When I validated to myself that it is understandable why I would feel that way, the armor melted and I could begin sifting through the lies. The truth was that my parents loved and cared for me, gave me what they could, which was in all possible ways better than what they themselves got. And since they learned and changed overtime, they were remarkably better than the parents my older siblings got.

2) Shame

A frequent flyer in the skies of my psyche. The inner bully was energized back onto the poolpit and started snarling at me about not accomplishing half of the things I should have accomplished before I turned 40. Some of the things I was on trial for not checking off, I was genuinely surprised to see on my supposed to-do-list before turning 40. That's how inner bullies work. Anything they can find or fabricate to use to bring us down on ourselves, they will not spare. It was publishing my book, sculpting a six pack, earning my degree, running a marathon? What?! Did my list get hacked or something?

Them inner bullies will also shrink evrything of value you have built down into unnoticable crumbs on the floor where they will have you rolled into the fetal position. Shame is a real bad one folks!

I wrote down every little and big accomplishing, impacting, growing, getting back up, loving, nurturing, adapting and releasing I have been doing throiughout my adult life. It didn't take much writing for the inner bully to quickly hibernate. A liar and a coward it is! It will be a while before it dares aim for that poolpit again!

3) Fear

My phone had been attentively listening to my conversations and texts that day. When I opened Instagram later that evening, the first Ad that popped up was about nothing other than Perimenopause. I would then go on an internet rabbit hole googling all my occuring and anticipated symptoms comparing them to the dreaded menaupause. In actual disbelief that I am even doing that. All the represnetations of an aging woman I have been fed all my life came crawling out like that scene on the Thriller by the cemetary with the zombies shuffling towrds Michael and his terrified date. I saw myself standing in front of an open fridge door while two nurses injected me with a dose of Botox and Estrogen. My husband was not in the picture because he was off looking for someone younger.

What have they done to us? Society, the big corporations, capitalism. What is the first image that populates your mind when you think of aging? Is yours any different than mine? Just curious.

Well, at the tender age of 39, a week before I welcome my decade of honed self exploration and validation, more tactical taming of the inner bully, striding at my own pace through consciously set and spiritually covetted milestones for myself, loving and nurturing from a Whole Self, I am sure of one thing, in the words of Myah Angelou and sang in Oprah's voice, "wouldn't take nothin for my jourmey now."

Not even a screpbook with a date stamped, dried piece of my umblical cord.