My Mother is 40 and I am 31 (Part 1)

An old Norwegian lady approached me one morning as I sat waiting for my turn to be attended to at Norwegian Teacher Academy's (Norsk Læreakademi) reception. A friend had asked me to go and inquire about masters programme for her.

The old lady was definitely not one of the students, neither was she after joining the institution. She must have gone there to meet someone. She was different from an average Norwegian. Majority of Norwegians are reserved, especially for strangers. She asked me series of questions—she was such a nice old lady.

After talking for a while, she asked me things that were personal but I didn’t see any reason not to answer her. She asked me my age and I told her—I was 31. She asked me about the number of siblings I had in my family. I told her that we are two and I was the youngest. We talked again for some time before she asked another question: “And how old is your mom?”

I was prompt with the answer. “40!” I replied. If you haven’t started laughing then you have missed the point. I am not forcing you to laugh but there is something ridiculously funny in that answer. Look at it again: I am 31, I am the youngest of two and my mother is 40. This means that by the time I was born, my mother was 9 and she was having her second child. This would have found a place somewhere in the Guinness Book of Record—isn’t it?

The funny thing is that I never realised even after implying that my mother was 9 when she got her second born. The point is that I lacked concentration with the figures and never combined the two (31 and 40) and see what they were saying. And the truth was: I didn’t know how old my mother was. And I didn’t want to say I didn’t know. I thought I was giving a fair guess. At that moment, 40 years sounded so much that I never realised that it was only 9 years away from my age.