So That Happened

I don't really want to write about turning 30. Not in public! Not on the blog, anyway. Not where my friends will see it. Most of my friends already turned 30. Two or ten or 30 years ago. As someone who got her first job at 16, who moved out of her parents' house at age 17, who graduated college and became a paid professional writer at 21, who had a kid at 23, who started a blog at 24, I've spent much of my life as the youngest person in the room, and my friendships reflect that. Most of my friends have already survived their own inner crises about turning 30. (Or even celebrated turning 30 with no crisis at all.) Hell, some of them have even already written about turning 30 on their own blogs. They won't want to read about my issues with 30, will they? What if they find my anxieties about growing older insulting? Or silly? Or trite? What if they laugh at me?

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Thirty is definitely too old to be worrying about whether people will laugh at me for things I write on my blog.

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I told my husband that what I wanted for my birthday was a shirt that said I'M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT. He didn't buy me one.

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In the days before my thirtieth birthday, my husband kept saying, "Thirty isn't so bad, you know." Sometimes it sounded like he was teasing me. Sometimes it sounded like genuine reassurance.

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When I was just 21, an abnormally, dangerously large cyst that had silently grown on my left ovary for months without my knowledge suddenly and violently ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. After I woke up from an emergency surgery that definitely saved my fertility and probably saved my life, the surgeon, who was a woman, a woman who seemed about 30, said, in a very sincere, serious, sympathetic voice, "The bleeding was severe. You will have extensive scar tissue. The effects of scar tissue on your fertility may well get worse over time, especially if you develop more cysts like this one. If you want to have children without expensive help, you should start as early as possible. If I were you, I would definitely try for pregnancy before 30."

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When I got pregnant just two years later (while using contraceptive measures) it was by accident, at an exceedingly inconvenient time, and frankly terrifying. Nonetheless, as I stared at those positive lines on the stick, the surgeon's words echoed in my head, and I could not help but feel vague sense of triumph. Before 30.

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My son has asked me "When can I have a little brother or sister?" at least once a month since he was old enough to ask the question. I never answer him directly but I always used to say, to myself, in my head, Not now. Not now. But surely before I'm 30.

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Every doctor I talk to about my past surgery tells me rather gravely that my insides must be positively riddled with scars. Time after time, the mantra I hear from doctors has been the same, "If you want more children, try now. Or at least try before you are 30."

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At various points in my life I have had no less than five English teachers mention to me their firm belief that most of the best writers peak before they are 30. Crane, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. "Write a novel before 30," more than one of them urged me. On the day I turned 29, I swore to myself I would finally finish one of the five or six books that keep rattling around, unwritten, in my head. I'll write a book by my thirtieth birthday, I promised. I didn't.

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Maybe those doctors are wrong about my prospects, anyway. How would they know? How could anyone know if I'd really have trouble getting pregnant again when I haven't even been trying? I should say we. After all, it takes two people to make one. We, mutually, deliberately, have not been trying.  In a marriage, ideally, making a baby requires a set of two of matching plans for the future. Plans do not always match, you know.

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Thirty is the age at which I always picture my mother, when I think of her, in my mind's eye. My platonic ideal of my mother is my mother at 30. I don't really remember what she looked like before she was 30, but I remember her face at 30 clear as day. I was 12 then. She was very young, for a twelve-year-old's mother.

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Why do those babymaking expert doctors always say 30? Why 30? I know I'm not the only woman they are saying this to. When they say it it always sounds like they've said it a thousand times. That seems so blastedly arbitrary, that invisible 30-year line. Hey, I'm no scientist, but I did happen to ace the A.P. Biology exam when I was in high school, which wasn't that long ago, thankyouverymuch, and therefore I do know that the technical, scientific term for individual medical predictions based on general statistics is bullshit. Sure, it may be true that women on average become strikingly less fertile after 30, but you can't expect that rule to apply to every individual. And anyway someone's 30th birthday is a totally arbitrary point in time at which to draw a line. What if I'd tried to get pregnant at the age of 29 years, 364 days? How would that be so different than trying to get pregnant tomorrow? Of course not. Not really. It wouldn't be. Anyway, I haven't been trying at all. Maybe if I did try tonight I'd get knocked up with twins, just like that.

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I don't think of 30 as old. I have plenty of friends who are 40 or 50, and I don't think they are anything remotely resembling "old." I do think of 30 as the end of youth, though. I always have. I always think it's weird when people call 30-something people young. Thirty used to be called middle-aged, not that long ago, remember? I don't really have a problem with that, being thought of as in the middle, immersed in life, in the thick of things. Part of me actually sort of resents the fact that fashionable people will probably keep calling me "young" until I'm 40, or 50. I've been to college. I'm married. I work. I have a son. Hell no, I'm not old, but I don't feel young, either. Haven't I done enough yet to be considered all grown up?

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My mother was so much older than most 30-year-olds at 30. When my mother was 30, she had two kids already and a third on the way. She already had two marriages, two careers and a master's degree under her belt at 30. She had already helped organize marches on Washington and taught hundreds of students to write and taught herself to refinish old furniture and filled notepad upon yellow notepad with poetry at 30. 

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If I don't try to write The Great American Novel, I can't fail.

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In the week before my birthday, when my husband would say, "Thirty isn't so bad" I usually replied, "You know, I don't really think you're old." But a couple of times, instead, I snapped, "It's different for you. You're a man."

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When I think of myself as 30, I can't help but feel rather strangely that I have somehow transformed, overnight, into my mother. When I look in the mirror now, I catch glimpses of her face.

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I am so relieved to finally be 30. Twenty-nine, honestly, just felt like an entire year of almost-30. The anticipation of 30 is far more annoying than the actuality of 30. No one will ever ask me again "How do you feel about turning 30 this year?"  Also now I can stop asking my husband what it feels like to be 30. I am sure he is relieved.

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I remember when my stepmother turned 30, I childishly asked her if getting older bothered her, and she said, "Actually, I'm thrilled to turn 30. To tell the truth I feel like I've been 30 my whole life, and my calendar age is only just now catching up."

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People used to put black candles on your cake when you turned 30. They used to decorate your party with black balloons and paper tombstones. They used to call you Over the Hill. No one does that now, of course, unless they're doing it ironically. I blew up a couple of black balloons for a friend's party two years ago. Ironically, of course -- I mean, hell, over the hill? He'd only recently been married. He was just about to finally finish his PhD and get out of school. Thirty is just getting started, these days. Of course my friend knew I was joking. But lately I kind of feel like a jerk for those balloons.

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When my mother was 30 she looked 25. When she was 35 she didn't look a day over 30. No, really. This one time I tried to pick up my little brother at kindergarten, and no one would believe I was his sister, because the teachers had seen my mother, and thought could not possibly have a daughter who was 17. They nearly called the police on me. Of course my mother was very proud that I'd nearly been arrested over her youthful face. The face that nearly launched a kidnapping investigation. She repeated that story for years.

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At parks, I still regularly get mistaken for my son's babysitter. Not bad for someone my age, eh? I'm really only sort of bragging, though. It's sort of disconcerting, actually, to have people think I'm my own child's babysitter.

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For my 30th birthday, my husband snagged a babysitter, got dressed to the nines, and took me out to the same club we went to on our very first date. I know, what a crazy romantic, right? The sushi was great; the cocktails, just as awesome and ridiculously strong as we remembered. But the music was lame, and the couches were worn, and the crowd seemed vapid, and the whole place was annoyingly smoky. We left at eleven.

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For months now, I've been fibbing about my age. This summer a 70-something man at the local historical society meeting asked, "How did such a young thing like you get interested in history?" and I laughed carelessly and said, "But I'm nearly thirty!" A firefighter I met on a volunteer voter education stint said, not even flirting, "You can't be older than my daughter in college," and I retorted, "Oh, you flatter me! I'll be thirty in just days." A month ago a little boy at my son's school asked how old I was, right in front of his forty-something mother, and I outright lied. "I'm thirty," I said, and shot her a furtive glance, deeply relieved to see that she didn't raise her eyebrows and purse her lips in the way every mother at my son's school inevitably did last year whenever I mentioned my age. I felt guilty for lying. I felt like I was squandering the last year of my 20s, erasing 29, and yet, I kept doing it. I couldn't stop myself. It seemed to me that in most cases telling someone I was almost 30 had a totally different effect than telling them I was 29. There's something magic about 30. People take 30 seriously.  I haven't fibbed this much about my age since I was nine years old ("I'm nearly ten!").

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All day on my birthday, I couldn't stop thinking, again and again, I really, really, really must finish writing a book before I turn 31.