Who Lies About Their Age?

     I owe someone a big apology. I said in my previous post that B had started her new career at age 55. She's been working at it for four years, so that would imply that she is now 59 years old. That was a colossal mistake, because nothing could be further from the truth. B is unequivocally not 59 years old. She's nowhere near 59 years old.

     She actually started her new career at age 54. She is only 58 years old. She won't be 59 for ... let's see ... three more months.

     Why is it that women are so touchy about their age?

     It reminds me of my mother, who lied about her age her entire adult life. Okay, who allegedly lied about her age. Because she never admitted it.

     My dad was born in 1911. The date was on his license; he freely admitted it. There was no question about it. Not an issue.

     My mother always said that she was a year younger than my dad, making her year of birth 1912. However, the date on her license was 1911. It was a mistake, my mother insisted. Her birthday was 1912, not 1911. It wasn't a big deal to us children. Why would it be? Who cares whether your mother is 55 or 56 -- or 75 or 76? Occasionally we'd joke about it -- about the "mistake" on her license. But nobody ever really called her on it.

Hey, we're not that old

     But there was also her college diploma. She graduated from college in 1932 -- the same year as my dad, not the year after him. If she had been born in 1912, that would have made her 20 years old when she graduated from college. Was that a mistake too? While we were all impressed that our mother was pretty smart -- after all, she had gone to college, a relative rarity for a woman in those days -- we also knew she wasn't that smart, not smart enough to have skipped a grade.

     The final nail in the coffin, so to speak, occurred when my folks retired and moved to Florida. A certain document surfaced. It was my mother's official birth certificate -- and it recorded her date of birth as May 26, 1911.

     When we, the children, confronted her with this fact, she got on her high dudgeon. Oh, no, my birth certificate is wrong, she told us emphatically. She went on to explain that her original birth certificate had been lost, many years ago, and to get a new document she had to get her brother to testify to her date of birth. (Her brother was a lawyer and Notary Public; I don't know if that was a requirement.) Anyway, according to my mother, he made a mistake. He recorded that she had been born in 1911, not her real birthday in 1912. It was just that her brother was rather overbearing, and to correct the mistake would have been too much trouble. Of course by this time, her brother was quite elderly and lived in another state, and so was unavailable to either deny or corroborate my mother's story.

      We all pretended to believe her -- what was the harm? But in our minds, she was busted. We knew that she was a year older than she claimed. Yet she never admitted to her true age, even as she progressed through her 70s and 80s. And we children, in the midst of our own callow youths, could never understand why a woman would continue to shave a year off her real age, even as she lived on into her 80s.

     Still and all, I can understand why B doesn't want me to add a year to her age -- especially since she'll soon enough have to face crossing the big threshold of six-oh.

     Of course, that begs the question:  My blog is called "Sightings at 60." And, truthfully, I was 60 when I got the idea for this blog. But by the time I actually started it ... well, "Sightings at 61" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. But that's just a practical matter. It's not like I'm vain or anything -- not like my mother.

     But in any case, I feel I must set the record straight. B is not 59. She is in fact 58. You know ... kind of in her mid-50s.

     But honestly -- and I mean this -- to me she looks like she's 39.