I’m glad that you’re meeting my husband, first. You’re still a year and a half away from me!
I don’t feel like I’m about to be thirty. But I’m starting to see it coming at me, and I’m flinching away.
It’s not really thirty, though, that’s bothering me: it’s FORTY coming at me like a charging bull, and thirty is the gate that’s creaking open.
These metaphors make no sense. Okay, to put it simply: thirty is only a year and a half away, and forty will be only ten years after that. And as fast as time is going right now, that’s scarily soon.
It took me forever to get to my twenties. Childhood and adolescence crawled by. Now I’m comfortably twentysomething with two babies, and it ought to feel like time is sliding by in a pleasant dream.
Instead, I find myself telling people, “Yeah, we’re not planning for any more children right now. Maybe a few years from now we might have a couple more.” and getting this– this skeptical look!
“That’s what my parents did,” I continue, as if nothing is wrong. “My brother and I are two years apart, but my other two siblings didn’t come along until I was five. My parents took a little break between the sibling pairs…”
At this point I trail off because the person I am talking to is not listening.
I think I get it, though. My parents got married at eighteen and nineteen and had both my older brother and myself by the time my mom was about 22. I have my two and I’m 28.
By the time my younger brother and sister were born, my mom was just about thirty.
If I wait five years and have two more like she did, I will be about 34 when my youngest is born.
I mean, I can do it. It’s just not the same somehow.
Anyway.
Thirty.
Thirty.
That about sums up the whole situation.
Thirty.
Huh.
