On Turning 30

Big moments in my life always cause weeks of introspection, looking back and then looking ahead and then back again. Is this where I want to be? who I want to be? and now turning 30 is no exception. I have literally been thinking about this day for the last 6 months. The conclusion is that I am happy to be getting older. I'm proud of who I am today, and the direction my life has taken. I'm glad that living means moving forward. And so these are the things I wrote in a notebook while I waited for James to get done with school, with Winston begging me to let him go down the slide and baby sleeping in his carseat.



A snapshot of me at age 20:
I'm looking pretty good in those size 6 jeans. On my days off, I can (and often do) sleep for 14 straight hours. When it rains, I go to Borders and spend the afternoon reading. When I go out with my friends, we go to the movies, go dancing, sit at restaurants for hours, but everything is decided a moment before it happens. I think I've moved out of my parent's house FOR GOOD, but it will actually take a few tries to stick. I think that my future career will be the greatest accomplishment of my life. I have just finished college and I have the world all figured out.

10 years later, I look at that young woman and sigh. She has NO IDEA.

She wants to see the world, and will become a flight attendant to accomplish her goal. She will see the Pacific Ocean. She will spend a week in Europe with her mother and it will meet her expectations and disappoint her at the same time. Because she thinks that someday she will live abroad, or quite frankly, anywhere but here, but everything that she wants will be in that little city in Ohio.
She doesn't know that the boy she is dating will become her husband in just a few years. That they will buy a house in Canton and fill it with children. That creating a family is something that she's actually good at. She can barely lift a 30 pound box, but one day she will carry a 50 pound child in one arm and a 30 pound child in the other when their strength gives out.
She will learn real love and real patience, not through some cosmic gift, but through painful and persistent trial and error. She will be more content and more confident when she turns 30 than she can even imagine being at 20.

I can't help but quote the Brad Paisley song that plays at the end of "Cars", and not just because I've seen it every day for the last four weeks: "Sometimes when you lose your way, its really just as well. That's when you find yourself."