Happy 80th Birthday, Mom!
by Weam Namou
Millions of Iraqis, including my mother and three of my older siblings, have a July 1st birthday. However, that is not the real month and date of when they were born. Until the First World War, many people, especially in villages and remote mountain areas, never had any identification. They simply belonged to their families and tribes. Their language and culture were their identities. Later, many people did not register their children when they were born.
In 1958, Adul Kareem Kasem was making a census, population count. The government told everyone that they could not leave the house for several days. They went door to door doing a count. Anyone who didn’t have a birthday, they gave him or her a July 1st birthday.
“July 1st was the happy medium, and was an easy way to do everything,” my brother told me. He and my older sisters also received a July 1st birthday.
So, since technically we do not know when my mother’s 80th birthday is, we did not feel too bad that it got postponed from July 1st to September 15.
Cultural Glimpse 
Happy birthday to your Mom! She has been through a lot.
My mother never knew here actual birth date while she was alive, either, because her records were destroyed in flooding in Pennsylvania. Her oldest sister thought it was in April and her baptismal record said it was in Feb. We usually celebrated it in February, but sometimes in April. She also lied about the year she was born because my father was younger. It was not until I began doing genealogy work on my mother’s side, a few years ago, that I found a census record showing she was born in 1900, 8 years before she said she was, and it showed her her age as being 4 months old in June. Hence, we finally found out she was born in February.
Wow, your mother had real guts! She stretched her youth eight years and got away with it. Well, probably if we all did that we would feel and look a lot younger.
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