Thirty.

So I’ve spent the past week telling people I’m zooming in on the big 3-0, pausing, and waiting for the inevitable funeral dirge humming and AARP references.  I laugh, but I want to interrupt them.  I want to stop all the 3-decades drama and just say “Yes.  I’m 30 now.  I’m in the final stages of 20-something and thank the Lord Almighty, because I almost didn’t beat it.” 

I’m not sure why that air of intimidation hangs around 30.  Maybe it’s because it’s the first age I can actually remember my parents being.  I clearly remember standing in the bathroom stall at Taylor Mill Elementary, holding the door closed for my first-grade classmate, Crystal (yes, the door locked, but holding it for a friend anyway was important social protocol).  I told her my mother had just turned 33, and that Meg and I were going to surprise her by playing her favorite Lionel Richie song on the jukebox at Pizza Hut that night.  (I was twenty varieties of proud because I’d be “paying” for her pizza with my Book-It gift certificate.* )  Crystal told me that her mother was 22.  (Yes, I know, give a Kentucky girl a break.)    

Maybe it’s because 30 is a notorious “deadline” birthday.  I shudder when I think of the number of pre-teen diary entries, which somehow became high school narratives, and later morphed into conversations on my friend Alicia’s dorm room futon, that all went something like:  “If I haven’t _________ by the time I’m 30…” 

Somehow, 30 never seemed like an age that would just naturally happen.  It’s hard to describe; but it always seemed to me like a promotion-level age.  Like one should have to take a course in how to be 30, at a special school where they cut up your Old Navy Frequent Shopper card at the door.  And then, if you are  deemed “ready” by a distinguished faculty (made up of the type of people who don’t eat lunch from the vending machines, always have working pens and plenty of stamps in their top desk drawers, patronize a drycleaner on a more-than-biannual basis, and generally give off that air of “30-ness” that inspires 29-year-olds to ask them to serve as a credit references), you graduate.  You receive a mustache and/or panty hose, and the ability to clean stuff.  

Alas, there’s no school.  But graduate, I hope I have. 

Not long ago, my book club discussed Ann Packer’s The Dive From Claussen’s Pier.  With more than a few gulps and sheepish grins, we remembered just how selfish we were in our twenties.  It seemed like a universal experience, starting in college when we didn’t pay for most of our own stuff, and even fewer of our own mistakes.  We spent the middle years in a struggle, fighting to get ahead of something (life, maybe?); to see this “plan” everyone was supposed to have by then, to figure out how life was going to take care of us, while recovering, slowly and badly, each time it didn’t.  The twenties were the great, trademarked, decade of “becoming.”  And ”becoming” is really, really hard.  It’s being baptized again and again in your own juices, and trying not to drown. 

I’m 30 years old tomorrow, and I’m done “becoming” for awhile.  In my 20s, I became a wife, became a mother, a lawyer, a writer, a mortgage-holder.  I’m ready to just be.         

 

*If you are reading this and don’t know what Book-It is or Lionel Richie is, you can go to eBay and find related items under the “vintage” tab.  They’re retro.  And as of today, so am I…

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