I'm 34 years old and happy about it.
I've never felt better in my life than I do right now.
That's my preface to this blog. Something happens to women in their 30's that has not happened to me and I know it won't happen any time soon, if at all.
A new thing has started to occur in my life that makes me turn into a green rage monster and split my pants. Here it is....
At least 3 times a week or more, some woman over 30 years old has to tell me that my time to have children is running out. Here's the deal, these women never know my age until I tell them. The subject is never brought up until I say "I'll be 35 in June." Then the vagina monologue starts... "Oh I would have never guessed that you were in your 30's. So are you concerned that you aren't married and don't have children? Children will complete your life, and you will be really sorry if you don't start considering this for your life. Are you afraid of commitment? Are you afraid to love?"
What I want to say to these nosey noo noo's is this....
Are you concerned that you have no other thoughts in your head except your husband and children's schedule? Are you happy with your lack of self worth so you rely on your children's love to fill the void? Do you have any regret that you married someone you barely like just because you needed to have children so someone would love you? The women who have come to me and taken it upon themselves to tell me how my woman parts are turning to dust soon are all miserable skin sacks. Their own kids find them uninteresting and I doubt their henpecked husband's have seen their own balls in 10 years.
After I emphatically say "No, I'm not concerned in the least," I get a speech about how my eggs are probably dying out and if I don't start thinking about having children, it will be too late. Let me explain something...
When other little girls growing up would play "house," I was in a dirty ditch outside playing "sniper ambush" and shooting a BB gun at my brother on his bike or looking for dinosaur bones. My parents would buy me dolls for my birthday and you know what I'd end up doing with those dolls? Stringing them up by their necks or duct taping them to the see-saw outside as POW's. Not much has changed from that time to now, mentally speaking.
I'm great with kids but I don't need them to come out of my body to feel that I have a connection with life. Kids love me because they know I'm not covered up with grown up concerns. I don't care if I have a good credit score so I can buy a house one day, I don't care about saving money for a day when I'm too old to enjoy it, I don't care about wearing a wedding dress and playing princess to the tune of thousands of dollars... and if all of my eggs turn to dust and I can't spawn, it matters not. If I really wanted kids one day, I'd adopt them. Being an adopted kid myself, I think I'd be more likely candidate for that route anyway.
If you are a guy out there reading this, then I just want you to know how lucky you are to be one. Your dude friends won't ever tell you that you'd better have kids soon or your penis will drop off and slither away into the night. You'll never hear any dude tell you "aren't you concerned you aren't married?" If a guy says that to another guy, it's because he wants his friend to settle so they can hang out more and the wife won't get upset.
I'm not saying that marriage isn't great or that children aren't great. I just believe that a lot of people get married because of a kind of nervousness about being alone. So they settle on the first reasonable person who will marry them for the same reason.
These are the same people who will spend thousands on a wedding because it's the last big show in the "highlight reel" of their lives. I guess they figure they'd better make it super awesome so people won't dare think they are deep down unsure about the decision.
Anyway, I digress.
I named this blog "I'm Peter Pan, Deal With It," for a reason. I believe that the older people get, the more they forget what living is all about. It's an illusion- this "adult" thing. The core of our soul wants to have unlimited joy every day. We forget to play, to dream, to drive a different route home because "hey why not?" So what if you get lost for 10 minutes finding another route home? It's the seeking and finding and discovering that can be such a fun process. Remember when you were a kid and you couldn't wait to be grown up because nobody would tell you what to do?
It's that ironic poetry? Who would have thought that the most critical and strict parent in your life would be YOU? We all wanted to grow up to "do what we wanted."
How many of us actually do anything we want to do? You live by the clock, you live by other people's schedules for you, you hear your own inner critic telling you that you are too old, too fat, too rusty, too busy... too dead.
My favorite story is "Peter Pan." I love the courage of Peter Pan. I love how he understands the adult world but gives it no place in his adventure of spirit. He watches his friends get older, covered up, and they no longer remember the shared adventures as real but instead those memories are "just silly stories they thought up when they were a kid." Meanwhile, Peter Pan hasn't aged physically and tries to reinstall the belief in the extraordinary to his true love/friend Wendy. He knows that if he can change her mind, gear it for the magnificent journey of life in the knick of time right before she "grows up and does what she's supposed to," she'll be saved from the miserable lackluster adult world.
There's no point to waking up each day if you aren't going to live according to that spark of light that lives within you. There's no nobility in being a servant of the world's demands. You can still get the mundane details of your life accomplished without BEING mundane yourself.
I know I sound preachy in this but it's because all of the naysayers that tell me "my time is running out," ...they have already run out of time for the real adventures of life. They would be lucky to experience even one major shake-up of their priorities that potentially could get their head back into the game. I write this blog to say that I am happy to be irresponsible with my time, elated to still feel that I have ample time to achieve my greatest goals, and if it takes me until I'm 90 years old to do it all... then I guess that would be the definition of a full life.
Anyway... Last thing I'll say is this:
Don't forget to believe in fairies, fight Captain Hook with one arm tied behind your back, and please, for the sake of your soul don't ever grow up.
