just a number

My daughter turned 2 today.  My daughter, holy crap!  In my mind I am not old enough to have one child, let alone two!  When did this happen?  When did I get so grown up?

My mother and father are 20 years older than me.  They also graduated high school 20 years before me, so we’ve had this nice 20 year thing going on to help me remember years and distances between--  Sadly (or maybe gladly), I don’t have the same 20 year thing with my own children.  I am more on the 33 and 36 year old plan.  Which means when they are my age, I am going to be really ancient..

This year was my 20^th high school reunion.  20 years!  I’ve been out of college for 16 years.  I’ve lived on the NH seacoast for about 15 years and been with my current company for 11 of those years.  That’s a long time.  That’s the mark of an older person, an advanced aged person to have those sorts of numbers following their longevity in major life events.

 

I’ll be “celebrating” my 39^th birthday this September.  How old is that?  It’s amazingly old as I have never been this age before and it kind of scares me a bit. 

When I was 10 years old, I remember my mother getting a bunch of black balloons for her 30^th birthday and all of those Over the Hill novelty gifts.  Man, she was so old at that time, right?  She was a grown up personified.  She acted like a grown up, she dressed like a grown up (sorry Mom, it was the 80’s and that beach chair shirt you had screams grown up, at least I think it was a beach chair)  She drove a grown up-esque car, did aerobics, and listened to John  Denver (again, sorry Mom,  but you did get a bit cooler once you discovered yee haw dancing!) 

My dad was 30 at that time as well (although he’ll love to remind you that my mom is 4 months older than him).  He was a grown up too.  Sure, he had wild hair, wore the Opus t-shirts and listened to his stereo playing air guitar, huge headphones with the coiled cord and sang Jethro Tull ala falsetto, but he was a grown up person. 

So they were old, right?  Could you imagine your parents at 30 hanging out with their friends or brother and sister laughing hysterically over old stories and pictures?  You’d never see them bickering and having their own parents (aka grandparents) needing to admonish them to cut it out.  They were cool, they were calm, they were sort of collected and they were in charge. They didn’t do those things anymore.  They were adults.

And I guess technically now that I am a parent and a grown up, I am in charge too.  How weird is that.  Am I actually in charge?  In charge of what?  That is what frightens me sometimes because when I look in the mirror, I don’t see a grown up.  I see myself being just myself.  I might look a bit more haggard than I used to be, but I don’t see myself being an age I remember my own parents being. 

I mean, how could I be their age?  I still like to have fun!  I still giggle over absolutely silly things (Tuesday night comes to immediate memory).  My brother, sister and I still act like we have always acted when we get together.  We still have fun, we still tease one another, we still gang up on my mom (Mufasa) in good fun. 

How could this all be if I am supposed to be a grown up?  

So when bright light hits dim head, I realize that my parents used to have just as much silly, stupid and childish fun as I still have.  We just didn’t see it because we were so focused on our own childhoods and the fact that they-were-so-old.   I sort of wish I could go back in time and rather than hanging out in the living room watching Yo MTV Raps making fun of Flavor Flav’s wall clock necklaces, I could be a fly on the wall in the kitchen see that they weren’t talking about stocks and bonds and other equally horribly adult things—They were totally having a blast talking about things that I would now wish to join in and discuss.
 

My promise to myself is to remember to age as gracefully and as unnoticeable as possible.  I look at my parents now, enjoying their deck, their reggae and rum painkillers (and MAN, are they good!) in the summer.  I look at their friends when they come over for a “deck party” and listen to their conversations, their silliness and I love that they act just like we do.  They just have a larger collection of memories to laugh about- 

Not so old afterall….