Are you really only as young as you feel? If you’ve grown up with a Leap Year birthday (like me), the concept of age can be a bit more complicated…
For most people in the world, their 40th recorded year around the sun will also be the year that they turn 40. I, however, will spend that year turning the ripe old age of 10. No fake IDs or a mysterious fountain of youth here – just a plain ol’ Leap Year baby. Occurring once every four years, Leap Day falls on 29 February and is used to make sure the calendar years stay in time with the Earth’s orbit. However, growing up, I definitely didn’t care less about the duty to keep summer from occurring in December. While my friends and family celebrated birthdays without a thought, I was rather indifferent about making my (approximate) birth date a grand event. In fact, throughout the years of having a Leap Year birthday, I’ve either found the passage of time arbitrary, or been hit over the head with light existential dread while deciding what age to put on my birthday cake.
What is it like to celebrate a Leap Year birthday?
Ballad of a Leap Year baby
Talk to any Leap Year baby you know (though you’ll be lucky to find one), and they’ll tell you that at one point or another, they’ve had a bit of a complex about the concept of birthdays. It doesn’t really make sense to a kid when someone tries to explain why everyone else has a birthday every year and you don’t. In fact, at the ripe old age of eight, I had already grown rather cynical about the idea of ageing and documenting the exact passage of time every year.
In the period where all my peers counted their age to the exact quarter, it’s hard for 13-year-old me to assert my teenager status when someone could simply say “you’re technically only three” to shut me up. I suppose my main thesis was: if I’m still physically growing a year older, regardless of whether I had an actual birthday every year, does a birth date actually mean anything? Granted, the only other strong assertions I had in my life by that point was the time spent booting up the family computer shouldn’t count as time actually spent using the computer. In the same vein, I didn’t want silly things like logic and reasoning to get in the way of a good time.
Pick a side: “28ther” VS “1ster”
An opinion that any Leap Year baby will have strong feelings towards is the age-old question of whether you identify as a 28ther or a 1ster. Although kinship can be felt with every other Leap Year baby you may encounter throughout your life (I’ve only met two others so far), this opinion can be a deal-breaker. No matter what the “government” says about 1 March being the marker of Leap Year non-birthdays, I’ve always identified with the month of February and will probably be a 28-truther for life.
As I begin to near the big 1-0, I’m getting quite blasé about birthdays. Although I will ride with 28 February every other three years for life (if I’m actually celebrating my birthday), I’ll just say whatever and do something in the general time frame. Past the important legal markers of adulthood and legal drinking age, not many people will ask for an ID and question your shaky birthday logic, like you’re trying to talk your way into a bar on 28 February at 17. However, I admit I’ll involuntarily notice what day someone wishes me a “Happy Birthday” on non-Leap Years… And secretly file it away in my head for no purpose whatsoever.
Who do we blame? I want answers
My fellow Leap Year babies, let’s face it: we’re probably going to have to deal with the “how old are you really?” question for the rest of our lives. While having a Leap Year birthday is a handy built-in ice breaker, who should we blame for this unnecessary childhood ennui? Honestly, maybe one of the guys who stabbed Caesar was actually a Leap Year baby getting his revenge for being told he’s only seven.
Then again, perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that Leap Year birthdays have famously caused “Leap Year Bugs” for systems that haven’t been adjusted to account for that extra day (serves them right). Consider those bugs just the accumulated temper tantrums of every kid who didn’t get a real birthday every year. Although being a Leap Year baby isn’t something that defines me as much as it did while growing up, I reserve the right to remain petty about birthdays!
It’s Leap Year – we deserve free stuff
I think the biggest effect of my Leap Year birthday is that I notice how starkly different things were only a few years ago, since I tend to count life by four-year chunks. The difference between 20 to 24 can be momentous and it can feel daunting when you’re forced to consider it seriously. While I can still cheekily say I’m “only 12 years old” some time in the future, the dark truth is, by that time, I’ll be physically 48.
For this trouble, wouldn’t it be nice if big corps gave Leap Year babies some free stuff on 29 February? When you consider all the unnecessary thinking we have to do, you surely can’t deny that we deserve at least one free cocktail every four years. All jokes aside, having a Leap Year birthday can be a fun quirk for an otherwise mundane life. You can count on at least two things to survive the apocalypse: a cockroach and a Leap Year baby, insisting that they’re actually 10 years old.
