Lorelai’s Last Birthday

Rory asks Lorelai if she remembers her last birthday in Richard and Emily’s house, and Lorelai says it was when she was pregnant with Rory, so April 1984. Later we find out that Lorelai didn’t leave home until Rory was almost two years old, so she would have had two more birthdays at her parents’ house.

Maybe she means that it was the last birthday party her parents threw for her, which is rather sad, but understandable – as a teenage mother she would have lost touch with old friends, and not had many opportunities to make new ones yet, quite apart from her parents wanting to keep their situation private. More likely the scriptwriter (Amy Sherman-Palladino) originally imagined that Lorelai left home at sixteen when Rory was a few months old before realising that wasn’t very realistic.