I had a revelation the other day while in the shower.  I’m thirty.  This is not new news by any means, as I have been age thirty for three whole months now.  I’ve also never been one to fret about her age.  I remember when my sister-in-law turned twenty-five.  She said she felt that she had reached a milestone.  A milestone?  Like you should be carded at bars anymore?  Like new wrinkles and gray hairs?  I don’t know, I’ve had gray hairs since I was at least twenty-three.  But thirty.  Say it with me, “thirty”.  Thirty is different I’ve decided.  A lot has happened to me in thirty years.

At 9 months (correct me if I’m wrong, mom), I slipped while trying to crawl up the stairs and my bottom front baby tooth popped out at the root.  It’s upstairs in my bathroom cabinet.  At four years old, I ran away from home…to the neighbor’s porch and hid under their glider.  It’s the first time I remember being called “a very bad girl”.  At age seven or eight, I was summoned to the “back of the bus” where all of the big, mean kids sat and tortured the little kids.  I cried and cried.  At age ten, my Pap-pap passed away and death became something very haunting to me.  That’s when I saw my dad cry for the first time.  At age fourteen, I kissed my first real boyfriend and broke the news to my dad that my Grandma had passed away.  That was the second time I saw him cry.  At age fifteen, I had my heart broken for the first time.  At age seventeen I graduated from high school and my dad passed away two months later.  At age twenty, I left home to be with my punk rock boyfriend and broke my mom’s heart.  At age twenty-four, I married my punk rock boyfriend and made my mom very happy.  At age twenty-seven, I gave birth to my first child, making my mom a Grandma for the seventeenth time.

Now, here I am at age thirty.  If I can sum up the major happenings of the first thirty years of my life in one paragraph, how will the next paragraph read?  The first thirty years were all about me.  The next thirty years will be all about my family.  What about the thirty years after that (not that I plan on making it to age ninety)?  Will life come around full circle for me?  All I know is that I want to be around much longer.  I want to have a smile on my face when I leave this earth.  A smile that says, “We did good.  We did real good”.  I have a lot to look forward to in the next thirty-plus years.

*One of my original Chicago Moms Blog posts