Birthdays and Your Date of Birth: When They're Not the Same!

Mara here. The day before this post gets published will be my 43rd birthday.

Yay, happy birthday to me.

But for me, "birthday" is a concept. The day that's designated as my birthday—August 26—is not my birth date.

Because I don't know when I was born.

I literally do not know what day, month, or year I was born. This means I don't actually know how old I am.

I know it's shocking (and it seems to freak some people out), but we'll get back to that later.

I have a love-hate relationship with birthdays. It doesn't have to do with getting older because that has never bothered me. I’ve always felt very old. When I was younger, it was a relief to get older because it was hard being a 12 year old who people thought was 18. It always felt awkward.

Now that I’m really older, well, I still feel old so it just seems as if it’s all happening the way it should. As I mentioned above, I don’t mind getting older. I’ve lived a pretty full life already and I don’t have the desire to be younger or have people think I’m younger.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a huge fan of my body wearing out. This body weirdness that happens as we get older sucks. But telling people I’m 43 doesn’t upset me.

It's the obsession with birthdays in our culture that's tough for me. It's a trigger for my anxiety. And it's not just my birthday that stresses me out, it's my family member's birthdays too.

There’s so much expectation and pressure built up from when we’re kids. It’s supposed to be “our day.” And “our day” is supposed to be special and exciting and full of presents and parties. And now, with social media, we’re supposed to get showered with birthday messages and text messages. And on television, people are always being surprised with fancy parties and balloons and vacations.

In addition, I don't really like parties and, to be honest, I don't like the pressure of feeling like I have to throw parties for other people. And I really don't like making other people feel like they're supposed to throw a party for me.

So I tend to have quiet birthdays. My birthdays are pretty much like most other days except with a few presents added in. (I am a fan of presents, so they are always awesome.) 

I think part of it is that we are conditioned from when we are kids to make a big deal out of birthdays. As a parent, your kid’s birthday is a huge deal! Let’s face it—we all feel as if our kids having been born deserves a major celebration. And it’s easy to do fun things for kids. We take cupcakes to school and all the kids sing happy birthday. And we throw a party and rent a bounce house and our kid feels like as prince or princess for the day.

Now that my daughter is older and a $10 board game and a popsicle don't make her wild with excitement anymore, it's hard to keep building on that expectation we cultivated that each year would be bigger and better than the last.

As we become adults and have to make that birthday amazing-ness happen for ourselves, it’s just not the same. There’s not the magic. Much like buying your own Christmas presents, throwing yourself a birthday party doesn’t have the same effect. But that feeling of expectation never goes away. Deep down, I still want someone to force me to wear a crown and have everyone get a cupcake on my birthday.

And now back to that teensy little detail of not knowing when I was born.

I’ve written previously about being adopted from Korea. The history of my adoption starts in Seoul, South Korea, where I was left at a police station with no record of who I was or when I was born. Unlike in the movies, where kids always have a note pinned to their shirt with their name and birthday on it, there was no information about me. I was a mystery.

Based on physiological factors, it was determined that I was around two at the time, so that was set as my legal age by the adoption agency in Seoul. By the time I was adopted, my legal age was three. After a couple of years in the U.S., based on my behavior and the fact that it was proposed that I was possibly small because of lack of nutrition in my early development, my mom and dad had my birthdate legally changed from March 26th (the day I was found at the police station in Seoul) back to August 26th of the previous year, so that I'd be old enough to start school.

Two birthday parties within six months of each other must have been pretty exciting for me, but I don’t remember them at all.

Let’s face it, none of us would remember the date of our births if we weren’t told about it by our loved-ones. And we are conditioned to believe our birthdays are special days because it is nice to commemorate the day that we were born into the world. 

But if you're like me and you don't know when you were born, then the celebration really does become simply a celebration of existing instead of commemorating a specific day.

And many people, even those who do have big celebrations for their birthdays, rarely have them on their actual birth date. They schedule them for the weekend or when a venue is available, so the birthday as a celebration is separate from the technical birth date.

The importance of birthdays is that they're an appreciation for having being born. It's a way of showing thanks for having managed to keep ourselves alive and, if we're lucky, accomplish a few things.

I guess if we really wanted to be crazy about it, we could celebrate every day the same way we celebrate our birthdays—because it's kind of miraculous that we manage to survive each day in this big wide universe. However, that would get expensive and exhausting. So we have chosen to celebrate birthdays and mark the years as they pass by.

But my birth date was selected for legal purposes, so my so-called birthday is a observance of that date, not my birth. And I love that my friends and family want to celebrate with me and put candles on my cake. But it doesn't change the reality, which is that I don't know how old I am. 

So I imagine my birth date doesn’t hold the same meaning for me that it does for everyone else. And while I don’t feel a gaping hole in my soul over it, I’m sure that my feelings about my “birthday” are not as sentimental as they are for people who know all the details about when and where they were born.

Plus, there is the added side-effect of having no way to appreciate astrology. When I was younger, aside from the fact that I thought astrology and astronomy were the same thing for an embarrassingly long time, I loved to read my horoscope in the magazines. I identified as a Virgo, even though I never put much stock in it. 

Then, at some point, it dawned on me that I might not be a Virgo because I don’t actually know when I was born so it really was pointless. I still read the Virgo horoscopes because habits are hard to break and it’s fun.

Okay, now here are some questions I asked my mom about my birthday and her birthday.

What went into the decision to change my legal birthday?

It was simple really. We realized that you'd soon be ready to start school, but your ability to do that was tied to your age. The only way you could meet the public school cutoff for age was for us to make you older. So we made you six months older. We hired a lawyer friend and went down to the Yolo County Courthouse and met with a judge in his chambers. The judge wrote a court order that changed your legal birthday.

Our plan to was make you about six months older. In Korea, they had set your birthday as March 26th because that's the day you were left at the police station. We asked the judge to make it August 26th, which we chose because that's a day that's meaningful to us. It's the day we flew to Los Angeles to pick you up, so that's the day you turned us into a family of four!

Because that's the day we first saw you, it's always felt as if it's the day I gave birth to you. In fact, August 26th feels the same to me emotionally as the day I gave birth to your brother. It just happened differently. It was the day a flight attendant carried you off the plane and put you into my arms. It felt right that this should be the day to celebrate your birthday since we had no way of knowing the actual day you were born.

There's a funny side to the story that goes along with the court order to change your birth certificate. The judge was supposed to make your birthday August 26th, 1974, but he got confused and put the year down as 1975.

We were walking out of the courthouse and I was reading the court order, and suddenly yelled, "Oh my god, the judge made you younger not older!" Our lawyer, Bob Black, took the court order from me and said, "He put down the wrong year!" He ran back to the judge's chambers. Luckily the judge was still there and made the correction.

Does it feel weird to you that you don’t know when I was born?

No, it doesn't feel weird. Once in a great while when you were younger, I might think to myself, "Maybe she's older" or "Maybe she's younger." But not knowing for sure doesn't feel weird to me because (and sorry if it sounds corny but it's true), it feels as if I gave birth to you in the airport when you were handed to me by the flight attendant. So it really doesn't matter to me what the actual date of your birth is.

My only concern over the years was whether or not it would matter to you. But it seems not to. And personally, I don't think the actual date of a person's birth is particularly important. For some people, it's very important,and that's fine, but it's not to me.

In fact, it seems as if it bothers people you know more than it bothers you.

[Mara: Yeah, I think it's because people can't imagine not knowing the date of their birth. But I've never known. And I think part of the reason it doesn't bother me is it's not something that ever comes up unless I bring it up. It's not like I tell people it's my birthday and anyone ever says, "Oh is it your actual birth date?" People don't question it.]


How do you feel about your own birthday? Do you attach it to feelings about getting older?

I have to admit that I have started doing that. I used to love my birthday. Just like you described, I felt like a "princess for the day." I loved the cake and all the presents. But since I became chronically ill and mostly housebound, a lot of "special" days have lost their meaning. For example, it doesn't matter to me if it's Thursday or Saturday. And the same goes for holidays.

And now it's become true about my birthday because your dad and I don't really do anything special. Sometimes we'll go out to an early dinner. But even that has lost some of its luster after, three years ago, we went to a fancy restaurant for my birthday and your dad ate something that made him so sick that we ended up in the emergency room.

Recently, I have had some sad thoughts associated with my birthday, because I am noticing more that I'm getting older. I didn't notice it when I was younger. Maybe it's because as we get older, it occurs to us that we don't have unlimited time left. But it's not something that I dwell on.

So my overall relationship to my birthday has changed. It started when I got sick, and the day has continued to become less important to me as each year passes.

That said, a couple of years ago, you made it a truly special birthday by giving me a bonsai tree. Growing bonsai turned into a enjoyable hobby for me. I now have a little bonsai forest in my bedroom so I have a wonderfully positive memory of that particular birthday.

Most importantly, what’s your star sign?

I am an Aries. You know, though, I hardly know anything about what that implies. I've never been into astrology. Maybe it's because my father-in-law was an astronomer and he once told me that you can't really be sure of your star sign anyway because the earth's movement on its axis over the years means that it aligns differently to each of the constellations that we use to decide our signs.

All I know about Aries is that it's supposed to mean you're a born leader, which I've never felt like anyway. So I've never really identified much with it.

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So what about you? How do you feel about birthdays? How do you usually celebrate?