Like most everyone on planet earth, I’ve been ruminating on the past decade.
Turning 40 actually felt less intense than when the clock ticked from 2019 to 2020 - even though technically we have another year before the new decade, which I take great comfort in.
Regardless, I turn 42 this year and 42 is a much scarier age than 40 to me, professionally, financially, and reproductively speaking.
One boon of the previous decade is that I’ve gotten much better at wrangling my fear. I know how to dissolve it and I might even be so bold as to say that I’ve mastered it…that is, if I actually remembered to do what I know to do in the actual moment. But as often as not, I circle the fear drain whenever my brain serves up a tender morsel of TIME IS PASSING WHAT HAVE YOU ACCOMPLISHED or YOU CAN’T AFFORD A BABY SO YOU’LL BE SAD FOREVER HAHA.
Sometimes I remember to check in with my wiser self and ask, Is that really true? And my wiser self will say: No. Time is not a thing, I’ve accomplished rather a lot. And even if I hadn’t, who cares? Maybe I can’t afford a baby in this precise moment, but circumstances can change quickly.
On the Baby / No Baby question, I freely admit that I’ve become quite set in my waking-up-whenever-I-want, no-distractions, having-free-time ways, and babies are not conducive to any of that. So the Baby / No Baby question gets a giant shrug, even as I careen into 42.
Of course, I would like to have the option. Maybe this needs to be the decade of standing firmly in my own moxie and saying I can do whatever I damn well want with this life of mine.
I admit I’ve been doing a bit of “Hey, you’ve had twenty years to get your house in order on this Baby Thing” self-recrimination.
But that’s not precisely true either. I didn’t want a baby in my twenties.
In my thirties, I would have said, Yes. Sure. Why not. But then I look back at this past decade - as we humans enjoy doing on the precipice of calendar shifts - and realize, There kind of wasn’t any time for a baby. There certainly wasn’t enough emotional or financial stability.
At the beginning of the decade, I had only just recovered from the break-up of a serious longterm relationship (circa 2008) and being fired from the last real job I held (circa 2009).
Hell-bent on a fresh start, I moved to LA (circa 2011). Bolstered by eight whole months of my healthy new lifestyle, I decided I wanted to be a world-traveling nomad. So I left my place in LA and went to Costa Rica, Amsterdam, and New York.
Then my dad died (2012) and I ceased my wanderings to hang out in my childhood bedroom and eat fried chicken under the covers. I got my shit together and moved back to LA, this time to Santa Monica, five blocks from the beach. Until I got punted out of LA and back to the Bay Area (2013). I struggled for awhile, got my shit together (again), and moved to Mill Valley (circa 2014).
I started feeling stable financially, emotionally and locationally, so I got into a relationship, my first real one since the breakup of ‘08.
Three months in, I got pregnant. In romantic comedies or other people’s blogs, this would have let to baby announcements on Facebook followed by an adorable wedding featuring an even more adorable toddler.
I miscarried (2015). Breakup (2016). New relationship. Breakup (2017). New relationship. Breakup (2018), a week before my fortieth birthday. Got back together in early 2019. Moved in with him in late 2019, the first time I moved in with a partner in eleven years.
Let’s do the math:
SF to LA, LA to nomad, nomad to San Jose, San Jose to Santa Monica, Santa Monica to San Jose, San Jose to Oakland, Oakland to Mill Valley, Mill Valley to Petaluma.
Eight moves in ten years.
Breakup, getting fired, death, miscarriage, breakup, breakup, breakup.
Seven major grief cycles in ten years.
Yeah, that’s a lot of moving and grieving for one decade.
(I am counting the two grief cycles at the tail end of the previous decade because 1) I hadn’t learned how to feel my feels by that point, so I had to process those cycles at the same time as some other cycles, which made me a really fun person to be around, and 2) it’s more dramatic that way.)
Throw in an alcohol problem - that, weirdly, got solved by moving to LA - a fair amount of depression and a whole bunch of sorta relationships in between the real ones and dear god. No wonder there wasn’t time for a baby.
So if this past decade was something of an unfathomable emotional roller-coaster, one that I just kept buying a ticket to ride again, where do I go from here?
While I probably made a whole bunch of questionable choices, I was carried by the tides to a relatively good place: I know how to feel my feelings, something I couldn’t manage (and didn’t realize I couldn’t manage) for the first oh, thirty-four years of my life. I know how to roll through grief, how to find stability within myself, and how to find joy even in the worst periods.
What I lack in savings, I gained in major life experience.
Thinking back on the past decade of my life, it’s the joy creeping in through the cracks of pain that I find most astounding.
My brother throwing paper airplanes over my father’s hospital bed.
Orange and rose sunset over the Pacific ocean a few weeks after my miscarriage.
Riding a giraffe with friends and a bottle of champagne on my fortieth birthday, a week after the last breakup.
As for where to go from here, that is a great big who-the-hell-knows shoulder shrug.
Now that I’m in a serious relationship again, a friend asked if I was going to get married. I replied that I couldn’t even begin to predict. Maybe. Maybe not.
I’m now very good at the wait-and-see. Life will show us what’s meant to happen when we stop trying to control every single curve of the road. As a grade A control freak, I’ve learned that the hard way.
Now, I indulge my control freak-y nature in organizing my schedule and telling my boyfriend how to rearrange the kitchen.
In this last decade, I also wrote my first book, and I love it dearly. I started a business. I traveled to Costa Rica and Amsterdam and New York and Hawaii and Ireland, which doesn’t sound super impressive compared to most travelers or even my previous decade, but I had to fit airplane rides in with all that moving and grieving. I ran a marathon. I ran two 200-mile relays. I got healthier than I’d ever been in my life. I realized that I know how to channel and heal energetically. I realized I could talk to a lot of improbable dead people, like Jesus and Joan of Arc and my dad. I learned that I could talk to even more improbable beings, like archangels and unicorns. If I lost you there, that’s okay. You can write it off to a wild imagination or tequila-induced brain damage. I made major in-roads on a second book, one that’s been seven years in the making.
Most of all, I have possibilities in front of me. I could publish a book. I could have a baby. I could get married. I could earn plenty of money to do all the travel and self-care and baby-tending and present-buying and goat-wrangling and home-renovation that I would enjoy. I could become a speaker and seminar-giver. I could do something wildly awesome that I haven’t even thought of yet.
In all that, I can always choose to be happy. Choose to be at peace. Choose to be a loving human, to myself and to other people and to the cats that don’t appear to care much about me unless my hand is actually in the kibble bag.
We can choose, in this decade and in all our future decades. We can choose how we view our lives. We can choose how we show up, We can choose what we eat for breakfast and how often we stretch our legs and how much we engage with people. We get to choose.
I choose joy. I choose not to let my fear or my feelings get the best of me. I choose to keep following my intuition, as I have done for most of the past ten years, down the winding road they led me. I choose not to engage in my own bullshit. I choose to engage more with life. Learn more things, take more risks, get a dog, create more stability so I can fly. Root to rise, as those yoga people say.
I choose me.
