La Familia Mathematica

La Familia
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

That's a picture of my mother and a little newborn me. I look a little preoccupied. Mostly I think I was concentrating on trying to keep my giant head from falling over. Look at that. My head is almost as big as my mom's. Thank god for epidurals, I guess.

Looking at that picture made me think about how much I like family math. What's family math? Well, it's the kind of math where you try to relate the ages of some family members to the ages of other family members. Confusing, no? Here's an example:

My mother was the age I am now the year I graduated from high school.

That's still a bit confusing, no? What I mean is, in 1988 when I graduated from high school my mother was thirty-seven. I'll be thirty-seven this year. If I had had a child just out of high school, that child would have graduated from high school two or three years ago. She or he would be almost twenty years old.

I love doing that kind of math. Here's another example:

My mother is twenty years older than I am. I have a brother who is forty years old. How old was my mother when she had him?

I'll let you run the numbers.

This next part is less about numbers than it is about expectations:

When my mother was my age, she had quite a few gray hairs. Consequently, I think gray hair is beautiful and I always thought that by the time I was this age, I would also have gray hair. I don't. Oh, I mean I find one or two a year, but that's about it. What gives? They say that gray hair is genetic, not stress related; if your mother and father went gray early, supposedly you will too. But that doesn't explain my situation at all. Does this? When my mother was my age, she had three kids, one was twenty, one sixteen, one thirteen.

I've got a twelve-year-old cat who doesn't cause much trouble. Mostly he sleeps.

Here's another crazy math problem: I was trying to figure out my grandmother's age in this photo.



That's my aunt with the bubble 'do. (Welcome to1966, huh?) She looks to be about five years old. My aunt is ten years older than I am and she was born in 1961. (Jeez, I hope no one gets mad at me for revealing their ages here.) My grandmother was 73 when she died three years ago, which means she was born in 1932. In 1966, she was 34 years old, a couple of years younger than I am now. In this picture, she was 34--if I'm correct about my aunt, my grandmother's third and last child, being five years old.