Then a young friend from Jezebel tweeted on Twitter her anxiety on discovering, "OMG IN TEN YEARS I'LL BE 32!!! I'M GETTING OLD!!!"
I calmly replied to her tweet with, "Oh, hon...I'll be 32 *this* year, and my 30s are my best decade yet!"
But it got me thinking. Wow, I'll be thirty-two this year. My Mom at thirty-two had been married ten years, and she gave birth to me, her second child, a month after her birthday that year. Many of my high school friends, and even college friends, are settled into marriages, with babies and children and even teenagers. Part of me wonders if I should be striving for that.
But it doesn't do to compare. Mom is a different person, and she grew up in a different time. Just as it doesn't do to compare myself to what looks "normal" in the world of love and romance and having a family. I just want to continue to improve myself, and have all of the fun adventures I can. Because in the end, an even bigger part of me doesn't want to settle down and have the same life as everyone else.
I want to go to Monterey for a few days of Spring Break. I want to jump in my car in April and drive to Indio, California for the Coachella Music Festival. I want to visit England as many times as I possibly can (money would be nice), and just live my life as I have been since college ended and my life really began.
Photo credit: xkcd Shamelessly stolen after seeing it on Sara's blog.
2 comments:
My best friend has a baby (although she is considered young to have a child) and it's made me rethink a lot of my life choices. However wonderful having a family is, it really devours you. You live, think and talk baby. My mother tells me it gets better with time, but I can see my friend consumed in motherhood in a way that relationships don't do to you. I'm not sure if I'll ever be ready to trade my adventures for that kind of love. But we still have time!
SA is totally right. It happened to me, and we were only trying.
But, to your other point, a) I got married at 38 and more and more women are doing it that way so not being married is getting more common for people in our generation so it's not something to fret about for those reasons; and b) marriage doesn't really solve anything. It's a lot like having a roommate whom you happen to love. But, career stuff, insecurities, unresolved anything will all still be there the morning after the wedding. True, it's really nice having someone else there when there are problems, but you still have to solve them yourself. I think the only thing that really changes is that you don't feel as lonely (also easily solved by having lots of friends), and there's someone else around to kill spiders.
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