thirty

Tonight is the last night of my twenties.

I sat--alone, Husband is at an employees-only-because-we-are-too-cheap-to-pay-for-drinks-for-your-significant-others holiday party--eating frozen pizza and watching Julie & Julia. Realizing that I prefer the movie over the book specifically because it's a Nora Ephron film.

Perhaps I've been thirty since age eleven (probably around the time I saw Sleepless in Seattle for the first time). 

I only made it through approximately the first fifteen minutes. The Queens-bashing (more prevalent in the book) gets under my skin. But what got under my skin even more was Julie Powell's feeling of failure upon turning thirty.

I've written a novel. And I'm constantly rewriting it, so its latest iteration is only approximately thirty pages long. Appropriate? So perhaps in essence I haven't written a novel at all. I have a Masters degree I'm not really using, since I have the same job I had before--and during--the program. I feel a little like Julie Powell. Except with a lot more love for Queens.

So I stopped watching the movie--in spite of all the cooking, all the France, and all the Streep--in order to work on my novel. I tend to plot while I'm falling asleep (is this normal?) in a daydream-type pattern. And I figured out what to do with the scene I've been working on like a week ago. But I never got around to writing it.

But then I opened my laptop and had a Blogger tab open and remembered that I wanted to write a "birthday" blog post. This is it, I suppose.

For many years--since I turned twenty-five, I think--I've dreaded this day. Well, not this one. I'm still twenty-nine. Tomorrow is the day I've been dreading.  Except at some point in the past year, I stopped dreading it. But why did I dread it to begin with?

More than any other seminal age--sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one--thirty feels like a true milestone. I really feel like an adult. I'm married, I've had the same job for five years, I've lived in the same apartment for five years, and I feel settled. Settling down, getting away from the constant moving, upheaval, and change that can riddle our twenties feels amazing to me.

Yeah, I've been thirty for a while, if that's my definition of thirty. I'm ready for what's next. The real settling down. Starting a family, maybe investing in real estate (or continuing to rent because real estate is insane and we like having a super to fix the toilet), and, before all that, really figuring out what I want in a career. I think that was the thing that made me hesitate about turning thirty. It seemed like I should have had that figured out, and have been moving up the ladder already. But I don't feel the need to move up the ladder. I think when it comes down to it, raising our family will be my real career, so why try so hard to pursue anything else? I'd love to freelance, have a bit of a schedule and some projects to keep me on task--and be able to stay home and watch my kids grow up.

There. I said it. I'm turning thirty in a postfeminist world and I want to stay home with my kids. If I can stay home and we have enough money to feed them, I'll feel very lucky indeed.

That's what thirty means to me. The blossoming of the things planted in my twenties. Maybe it won't be this blog turning into a book--eek, who wants to hear me talk about myself that much?--like Julie & Julia. I only hope that ten years from now, I'll be tending my harvest.