I have no sweet clue how old I was here, but I'm guessing "young."
When I was four years old, my mother decided I was ready to start Kindergarten.
She says she knew I was ready—more than ready, if you believe her stories of three-year-old me writing out C-A-T and P-I-G in the sandbox.
As she was a stay-at-home mom for most of my childhood, I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t at least partially motivated by the strong desire to make someone else share the responsibility of dealing with my holy terror self… but her version makes me seem way smarter, so let’s go with that.
Either way, she wanted me in school. Only problem with this plan was that I needed to be five in Kindergarten, or at least turning five by the end of October.
My birthday is in March: long past the cutoff. I’d have to wait another year.
Except that: (a) my mom was seriously convinced I was ready, and (b) my mother does not take no for an answer.
So, she did what any caring mother would do when trying to ensure her daughter the best possible education: she forged my birth certificate and made me a year older.
(And that, right there, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about my mother.)
In Quebec, up until not too long ago, your birth certificate was often the same as your baptism certificate, issued by your church. These certificates weren’t exactly state-of-the-art in their security measures: they were basically glorified church letterhead, filled in by typewriter. Easy for enterprising mothers to fudge.
So it really wasn’t that difficult for my mom to end up with a perfect replica of my birth certificate… identical except that my birth year was one lighter than it should have been.
Phony certificate in hand, she registered me in Kindergarten and I was all set.
Of course, being that I was only four, my mom wasn’t sure how to explain all this to me, and it was important that I kept up appearances. I needed to answer “five” whenever anyone asked how old I was, and she didn’t trust my little mind to be able to keep up with the lie.
Anyone else note the irony that my mom thought I was smart enough to start school a year early, but not to say “five” instead of “four”? Well, Mom likes to cover her bases.
So, part two in her Outsmart the School System plan was to throw me a fake birthday party in August to convince me I actually was five.
That's me, at the head of the table, super-excited to be turning five.
Turns out kids don’t have such a great grasp of time! Even though I’d celebrated my real birthday not six months earlier, I saw no problem with this second birthday. Hey, it was a party for me; why would I be suspicious? I do distinctly remember thinking it was odd that my birthdays were usually in the winter and here we were celebrating outdoors in the sun… but, look, presents! And cake!
I wonder if the other parents who were in on my mother’s scheme—mostly relatives and close friends—were irritated that they had to buy me two sets of birthday gifts that year.
So, I turned “five” and was fully psyched to start school. My mom’s instincts about me being ready were right, it turns out: on the first day of Kindergarten—you know, when parents are allowed to hang around with their kids, who are really just running around and playing games and being kids—I was completely unimpressed with how disappointing this whole “school” thing had turned out to be. I tugged on my mom’s sleeve and asked in a whisper when we were going to start learning, which I’d been promised was the whole point of going to school.
(And that, right there, pretty much tells you everything you need to know about me.)
I turned fake-six that year on my real birthday in March (more presents and cake!) and fake-seven the year after (hey, how come my birthday seemed to take so long to get here this year?). In grade 2, as I was about to turn fake-eight, my mother sat me down at the top of the stairs at home and told me we needed to have A Talk. She told me what she’d done in order for me to start school early. And she told me that, on my upcoming birthday, I wasn’t turning eight. I was turning seven.
Well, once you hit your 20s, getting older starts to lose its appeal very quickly. But when you’re a kid, getting older is everything… not to mention that the years pass so much more slowly when you’ve only lived through a handful of them.
Needless to say, this news was not greeted enthusiastically by me. At all. Not even a little bit.
I had to be seven again? I’d already spent a whole entire year being seven! I wanted to be EIGHT!
Next time you watch Almost Famous (which you know you should be doing on a regular basis, right?), watch for that scene early on where William finds out his mother pulled the same sort of scam and he’s really 11 instead of 12. Yup. That was me.
The year I finally did turn eight was the most relief I’ve ever felt at a birthday.
Fast forward a couple of years. When I was finishing up grade 4, my teacher approached my mother and said the school would like to skip me ahead to grade 6. “Um, no thank you,” my mother told her.
“But she’s very bright. We’re sure she could handle it.”
Academically? Possibly. Socially? It was already tough enough being a year younger than my classmates. (It’s not like I was the picture of popularity, anyway; remember, I was the kid who wanted to “learn” in Kindergarten.) My mother knew being two years behind everyone else would just be asking for trouble. So, she ‘fessed up. By then the school was well acquainted with my mother and I don’t think anyone was surprised.
Years later, when I was 18, I needed my birth certificate to get my driver’s license. Digging through the files, I found it and went off to the service bureau. And, yup, as luck would have it, I’d picked up the wrong one. I was a year older again, at least in the eyes of the government. (And I wasn’t even gaining any privileges with my official fake ID: the drinking age in Quebec is 18.)
For all my mom’s scheming, I really can’t believe she overlooked the ultimate opportunity in all this. Just imagine she’d kept up the charade until I was about to turn fake-30, and then told me: “Guess what? You’re really only turning 29!”
Now that would have been the best birthday gift ever.
Epilogue: this would make for a much better story if I eventually went on to be the youngest surgeon to ever come out of Montreal or write a best-seller at the age of 21 or something. Nope. Nothing even close. It’s almost like I peaked at age 4.
(If any Quebec officials of any sort are reading this: Ha! Ha! Totally just kidding, you guys!)
