23 going on 40

fast forward my life please

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for suburbia. Two kids in a McMansion in the suburbs of Austin. Alex and I send them to Montessori, where they get to explore their own interests but only if their desires are at least semi-acceptable to Montessori parents. As with many families in the suburbs, Alex is the main breadwinner, and I’m probably a housewife or working a 9-5 to follow my passions and not necessarily for the money. During the day, I work my job or run errands and write and watch the lizards in the backyard. In the afternoon, I pick the kids up from school and push them on the tire swing in the backyard. Then it’s family dinner time, and Alex and I try to get the kids to eat a few more bites of broccoli casserole before it’s time to put them to bed. There is a sense of order and stability to this life. We are relatively happy and at peace.

I can’t tell you how many times over the past five years I’ve wanted to be older already. Being young, with so many questions and so many lessons not yet learned and so many ways that I compulsively loath myself, is difficult in its own right. What I find interesting about my suburbia fantasies are the implicit assumptions that my fantasies reveal: life will be much more meaningful, and somehow more peaceful as well, when I have kids. Somewhere along the way, between 23 and 40, I must have lost the ability to scream at myself for every way I fucked up my own life, and my compulsion to angst over all my thoughts and decisions must have lightened as well. More external stability in life necessarily translates to more internal stability as well. I won’t ever find myself at midnight, after putting the kids to sleep, secretly wondering where all the fire I had at 23 went and whether I’ve wasted years of my life along the way.

When I say I want to be 40, what I really mean is that I want to escape the terrifying vastness that seems to come up when I start asking what life I would like to carve for myself. Is this job really aligned for you? Is your partner the person you want to spend the rest of your life with? Are you sure there’s not a part of you that knows you are selling yourself short? I want to fast forward and be done exploring and have all the uncertainties in life hammered out, even though I know that’s impossible. This is my life, and it’s up to me to shape it in the directions I’d like it to go. So after yearning to be a housewife for a while, I come back to reality and dive back into the angst. How terrifying and exciting it is to be 23.