Like most people in the world, I grew up having only one birthday.  After all, everyone was born on one day, a date that is usually fixed forever in the memory of her mother (if not also her father), and one celebrates on that day.  In my case, that day was September 5, 1951, shortly after midnight. (My mother used to say that I kept her up worrying right from the beginning. She was half-kidding when she said it.)

It was an okay birtday. Because my mother was stubborn, I made it into first grade in 1957, although the "cut-off date" was that I was to be six by September 1, 1957.  She argued that I already knew how to read, and she might kill me if she had to keep me home, bored.  (That's an exaggeration of the truth, but I'm sure it's what she thought!)  They gave in rather than fight her, so I had the distinction of graduating from high school while I was still 16, and with a four-year BA before I was 20.  Okay.  It seemed impressive at the time, though!

But, I was destined to get a second birthday.  When I was 18, having already been to the US without parental supervision once without a birth certificate -- no easy feat, it turns out -- I decided I needed a birth certificate.   And the province in which I was born (Quebec) had taken to issuing nice laminated cards one could  carry in one's wallet.  So I put my mother to work getting me one.  (Well, it's her job, don't you think??)  Some weeks later, she got one.   It said, in black and white, that my birth date was September 4, 1951.

My mother fumed, and tried to figure out how it happened.   "It's probably because I was in labour for 29 hours, and your witnesses (who were all old geezers at the time) probably got tired of waiting, and assumed you'd be born before midnight on the 4th instead of after midnight on the 5th. But I was there, and it was the 5th."  So we explored how to get it changed.  It was going to involve a lawyer's fees and court costs, it turned out, since all the witnesses were no longer geezing but were dead.  I said, "I can live with it.  I'll just write September 4, 1951 on any legal documents."  Which I did.

But it started to feel very odd writing a date that wasn't my birthday, that no-one except me thought of as my birthday. So, when people started asking me, I said my birthday was September 4th legally, and September 5th really.   Inevitably, people would ask which I celebrated, and I'd say "Well, both, of course!"  It seems peculiar to others, I think. And while my mother was alive, she obviously took it as some measure of betrayal in her role in all of this, and acknowledged only the 5th as my birthday. 

My Dad told me that his birth certificate was wrong, too.   It said his birthday was October 23rd, when it was really October 22nd.  His happened because his witnesses were all orthodox Jews who knew he was born after sundown, so they figured out the Hebrew date first, then translated back, and it turned out to be the 23rd.  He always just signed that his birth date was the 22nd, and had never told anyone about the error (except me, I guess).  But then, he also never had a passport, for example.  (The only time he went to Europe, he was part of the Canadian Armed Forces, and he didn't need a passport for that.) 

But I couldn't imagine why one would choose to celebrate only one day when one had a good excuse to celebrate two.  I asked him why he didn't just celebrate both.  He said, "What if people counted them both, and then I'd be twice as old as I am now?"  It took me a while to think through the folly of that question!  And when I said, "No, really!  Why don't you just celebrate both?", he said, "Because it never occurred to me."

Well, it's occurred to me, and I like it.  So much so that when it turned out that I needed to have two weddings (don't ask; I'll cover it next May, I promise!), I arranged to have them on two different days so that I could have two wedding anniversaries, too.  So, I'm just a double-celebrating kind of gal, and I'm off to celebrate now.

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