A few ruminations on aging since my children won't sleep:
This week, I had lunch with Madessa Rouse and Jennifer Orange Jenkins together for the first time in probably eight or nine years, and as we talked, as old friends tend to do, like no years, or college degrees or wars or husbands or children, have gone by at all, I studied them and thought, surprised, how young they looked, not that much different from when we were writing for our high school newspaper and carrying on with various shenanigans involving cat urine perfume and overgrown mall bunnies (you had to be there) and we had only heard how old 30 was in a Deana Carter song.
But is that a conceit, a sweet, forgiving one, of age? Do we always see each other not as we really are, but when we were at our "best"? Maybe so, or maybe teaching and Afghanistan have been especially kind to my friends, but at any rate, it made me reflect a bit upon both the sadness and the fortune of growing older, as I turn 31.
I recently read a book that best illustrates how I feel about youth, from Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior: "It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she had been. As opposed to the fool she was probably being now. People hang on for dear life to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.”
It does seem ridiculously unfair that we spend all that time with all that perfectly unlined skin, with everything where it's supposed to be without even trying, with our hair so thick we complain about it, and all we are is a beautiful container of achingly bad choices, all because we ignore the entirely true but hard to believe statement that if we just give it time, everything will work out. When all you have is time, you don't want to wait for anything, ironically enough.
For what is being young without that misplaced, unreasonable sense of urgency, like butterflies who only have six weeks to live?
And of course, until I got here, I thought all those articles about your thirties being the best decade of your life were just to sell more copies of Redbook and make old ladies feel better about needing to wear sensible shoes, but it's weirdly sort of true. At least the part about feeling more settled, about knowing who you are and not having that underlying sense that something is lacking -- that self-consciousness of youth that makes you do stupid things for no reason. You feel more comfortable in your own skin in your thirties, and it would be nice if that skin looked like the skin you had in your twenties, but oh, well, that's what injectable botulism is for, or so I am told.
Anyway, so speaking, as I think I was about 2,500 paragraphs ago, of ladies who lunch, two nice ladies stopped me in another restaurant a couple of weeks ago to tell me that they had known my mother back in their own school days and that she was and remains the most beautiful woman they had ever seen.
This is by no means the first time this has happened to me and it will not be the last. (And I'm sure it is true.) But it was the first time Ryan pointed out that someday it would be Summer and Sparrow hearing this about me. I hardly think so, but the point is, it was my favorite quote from the books we read in high school, how we are borne back ceaselessly into the past, but somehow it didn't hit me until this moment in the restaurant, how sad, how certain, how constantly and how soon we become the past.
I am only 31, and today I told my grandmother how very old I am. "You could be 90, like me," she pointed out-- my grandmother, who sometimes doesn't even know who or where she is.
We celebrate aging -- first birthdays, with cake smashes; 16th birthdays with cars that hopefully no one will smash; 21st birthdays beginning adulthood -- until suddenly, there is a number when we don't anymore, when we had rather not talk about it, and then the number, if we are blessed, gets so high that we are too proud not to tell everyone again, and we celebrate it as loudly and with as much fanfare as we do a child's.
So, fellow 31st-ers, I really can't decide if we are old, young, or somewhere in between, but I know that either way, there is only so much time to celebrate, and I am not going to waste any of it! Happy Birthday to me!
(And to anyone who made it to the end of this, you must have aged quite a bit yourself, for my children have just now finally closed their little eyes. Ha.)
*Little of the above is applicable to men. They have different aging rules. See Clooney, George. Also, Sigh, Unfair.
Jenni Osborne Craig lives in Russellville with her husband and co-owner of the award-winning Todd County Standard, Ryan Craig. Jennifer Orange Jenkins is married to Gary Jenkins and teaches at Adairville School. Madessa Rouse is in the military and the daughter of Brian and Lori Rouse of Schochoh. They are 2001 graduates of Logan County High School.