How Many Years Do You Have?

Today is my wife Morena's birthday...



It's not polite to reveal a woman's age, but even if I wanted to, I couldn't. Despite the fact that we've been married for nearly five years now (that's like, half a decade!) I still don't really know how old she is.

When we first met she told me an age, and then a couple weeks later she must have forgotten what she told me the first time and told me something different. She somehow got younger in a week! Later on I saw an ID and saw a completely different age from the other two... and entire DOB was listed wrong.

As it turns out, El Salvador had some law that when a child was born the parents had a certain amount of time to register the birth with the government or they'd have to pay an excessive penalty fee when they finally got around to filing the paper work. The only problem was, if you lived way out in the country in a poor town where almost nobody had a car, it wasn't so easy to travel all the way into the city to get that done... Parents were faced with a decision, either give the correct DOB and pay the fine, or lie about the DOB and pay nothing extra. As a result, almost everyone from my wife's town has an official DOB that is wildly inaccurate... So was she born on 12/12/76, or 2/1/77, or was it something entirely different?


I don't know, she doesn't know, her dad (the one who did the registration) passed away like 10 years ago, and her mom had 13 kids so she doesn't recall the specifics either... So basically, trying to determine my wife's age is like trying to figure out the correct age of a Dominican shortstop.


But regardless of accuracy, this is the designated day we celebrate. So happy birthday Morenita... You pick my dirty socks up off the floor and toss them in the hamper, you always remember where I left my keys, and when I fall asleep on the couch watching TV I somehow wake up wrapped in a blanket with a soft pillow resting beneath my head... And for that, you deserve to have the best 3_th birthday anyone has ever had!