Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s Already Forty!

My parents got divorced when I was ten and both remarried soon after. My mom married a man several years younger than her. By coincidence, the wedding was two weeks shy of her fortieth birthday, and he joked that he’d scheduled it for that date because “I wasn’t gonna marry a forty-year-old!”

Several years after that, Mom got really into genealogy. She was adopted as a baby and was never particularly interested in finding her birth parents, but as she was researching her family, she did find records related to her adoption.

In particular, she found out that in our state, at the time she was adopted, kids got a whole new birth certificate when they were adopted. She’d been given a new name, new parents, and a new birthday — the day on which her adoption was formalized. With a little more digging, she found her original birth certificate, which showed that she was roughly three weeks old when she was adopted and, therefore, was roughly three weeks older than she’d thought she was. She’d turned forty the week before her wedding.

We still tease my stepdad sometimes about how he married a forty-year-old after all. Since he’s now in his fifties and happily married to a sixty-year-old, it doesn’t seem to bother him much.