A confusing time in history

My mom is a Revisionist Historian. Not of world history, but of family history. A woman who bears five children over a period of 20 years and spends most of her lifetime raising them is clearly a candidate for Revisionism. As I grew up I gradually discovered that things weren't always quite what she had told me they were.

Take the issue of her and my father's ages when I was born. Straightforward enough, wouldn't it seem? Nothing to fool around with there. Unless you are my mother.

I had always been under the impression -- indeed, my mom had told me so herself -- that she was 42 when I was born and my father was the ripe age of 45. Not so unusual now, but it was back then (and if you ask me when "back then" was, I shall do a little revising of history myself). These two numbers were burned into my memory. I recited them to everyone.

When I was 15 and entering driver's ed, I needed a copy of my birth certificate to show the driver's ed people. It was the first time I had seen it, and I was eager to look at it. I had always secretly believed that I had been adopted. Here was my chance to finally prove it! Perhaps I would find that my birth parents' names had been whited-out and my adoptive parents' names typed in their place. Technology wasn't too advanced back then.

And there it was -- my proof! Not in the names of my parents, but their ages. In the little box underneath "Mother's age," "41" was neatly typed. Under "Father's age" was "44."

"I knew it!" I said to my mother. "I was adopted! I always suspected I belonged to someone else!"

"What are you talking about?" she said.

"This!" I said, waving the document in front of her. "This proves I was adopted! How long did you think you could keep it a secret?"

She waited for me to stop waving it around and said calmly, "You are most certainly not adopted. I did not make up all that pain."

"Then how do you explain these ages on here?" I demanded. "You always said you were 42 when I was born, and Dad was 45. Here it says my real mother was only 41 and my father was 44!" I had her now, I thought.

"Oh, that," she sighed.

"I'm just finding out someone else gave birth to me, and you can only say 'Oh, that?'"

At this point my mother was probably severely tempted to say that yes, I had been adopted, and give me the name and address of some fictitious mother -- far, far away -- who could talk sense into me. Instead she shrugged and opted for the truth.

"I say I was 42 when you were born because I turned 42 just a month later. And your father was 45 just another month later. At that age, a month or two doesn't make much difference."

My big dreams of grandeur -- of being the real daughter of someone wealthy, someone who all her life regretted giving away her beautiful baby, someone who had died tragically and left all her money to that long-lost daughter with the stipulation that the first thing she do with the money would be to buy a car (after all, I was about to enter driver's ed) -- all came crashing down.

Part of me was glad that I hadn't really been adopted. I had the same mother I had always had, and yet she was not the same to me from that moment on. I realized that never again would I be able to take the Revisionist Historian's word at face value.