Why Your Friends Without Children Look Younger Than You

I am a parent. This statement says a lot of things about me and about what my life looks like. Most of those things are really, really lovely things. Being a parent means I get to kiss foreheads of sweetly sleeping children at night and wonder what they might be when they grow up. It means I get hugs and snuggles from the sweetest little kindergartner you ever did see. It means there are super fun Christmas mornings and over-the-top excitement about birthdays and pancake breakfasts and family dance parties. There are SO many good things about parenting. Really.

But, today I feel the need to talk about the dark side of parenting that, if you are considering pro-creating, you might need to hear.

Prepare your hearts.

Being a parent means that you will age at an accelerated rate that I have calculated to be inversely proportional to the number of children you have, multiplied by the number of times they have unconsciously cheated death on the eighteen foot tall slide at the park you sometimes frequent.
(Note: I'm not good at math, so this word problem may not be accurate. But, you get it.)

Do you know how presidents in office age four times faster than the average person? Well, parenting is like that, only more so and for a longer period of time.

There is a slippery-slope of parenting-induced aging and it starts out with the lines around your eyes being visible long after you've stopped smiling. Unfortunately, it turns out smile lines only look good on George Clooney, which is egregiously unfair.

Lately, I've noticed unsettling changes in my skincare situation and I'd like to make a list here of parenting-related things I need to blame my wrinkles on. If I had a therapist, this feels like something he or she might recommend as healthy therapy:

Here we go:

-Requests for juice, snacks, extra meals, milk, treats, shows, information about robots, etc. are made of me every 24 seconds that I am in the same vicinity as my children, regardless of whether their other parent is also present and/or available.

-A small individual appears in my bed promptly at 1:30am every night and proceeds to elbow me in the eye with impressive accuracy and also frequency.

-People in my house aged 9 sing songs about our "majestic cat" at the top of their voice at most every waking hour of the day.

-People in my house aged 5 are packed full of enough emotions to fill a Superdome and also a nearby parking garage. All of these said emotions are unleashed at any and every provocation by the formerly mentioned 9 year old. Also, by soup, mismatched socks, and the difficulty of sharpening a pencil.

- So many Superdome sized, 5-year-old emotions in my house right now. So many.

- The small people I gave life to do not enjoy my cooking. Ever. Well, except for taco night. Often, there are protests and sit-ins.

- Every child I own wears 18 different outfits a day, or at least that's what it feels like when I do laundry. Which I am doing at all times.

- No one wants to go to bed. Ever. Except for me.

- Also, a toy/craft/shoe explosion goes off in my house every day from 3pm-8:30pm. Longer on the weekends.

If you or someone you love is considering giving birth at any point in the next 10 years, I would strongly suggest you/they begin a rigorous anti-aging skincare regimen now.

And now I have to go because there are 534 loads of laundry waiting for me.

That Time I Thought I Wanted Fourteen Children

Once upon a time, in those halcyon days before the internet and skinny jeans and Instagram, I had a lot of ideas about what growing up would look like. I was pretty sure I'd be married by twenty-one and I had big plans for the boatload of children I'd have. It was also part of the plan to get a college degree, which would effectively prepare me to homeschool all those kids Prince Charming and I would bring into the world.

 

Forty-year old me is kind of glad most of those plans didn't materialize.

I graduated from college with a regular B.A. and not the elusive MRS., which contrary to all feminist movements on my campus, I had been very eager to achieve by the end of that four years. And, then, after seven years of the single life, living in a handful of cities, traveling to a few different countries, making friends that are still like family to me, I got engaged in a pink castle in Sweden one month before I turned 29. Literally the brink of spinsterhood.

My ovaries being a little older than I thought they'd be when starting a family, I was motivated to add to our tribe pretty soon after tying the knot. It took longer than I thought, but a little more than two years into being a wife, I become a mom. 

I was pregnant four times in five years and then Mae was born almost four years after Sam.

When Mae was two and I was thirty-seven, I started dreaming about another baby. I'm pretty sure that there could be a case made for that early baby stage being a kind of addiction. Once they start walking and talking, it's easy to begin reminiscing about those sweet days rocking a tiny baby to sleep, listening to their coos before they have words, and being enamored with that toothless smile that's gone before you're ready. But, then you realize that the only way to satiate that addiction is to keep having babies and eventually that just doesn't make sense anymore. 

But, and I'm getting to why I started typing this little post out at all, that same summer of being overwhelmed with the desire for another babe, the opportunity to help get a small non-profit off the ground came along. Without my realizing it, a gradual replacing of desires happened. Instead of pining for a baby, I found myself heart-deep in creating a respite for women whose pregnancies and births were much different experiences than mine had been. 

It turned out that instead of my being given another baby, I was given the chance to advocate for other women to have theirs. And, almost four years later, I see how that was the best thing, despite being so different from what I'd thought I wanted. 

Lately, I keep making new plans for myself and plotting out what I think should be my next steps. But, I'm less sure of my life-planning skills than I was at twenty-one. Some days that feels terrible. But, other days, there's comfort knowing that the verse we all loved to quote about God giving us the desires of our hearts if we would just trust in Him, actually has more to do with His desires becoming ours than the other way around. 

And that's good news, because if Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram have taught me anything, it's that I wouldn't have survived homeschooling fourteen children. 

On Being Forty

One day, unless you have already passed this milestone, you will turn the big 4-0. You will know it's coming and maybe have even braced yourself for it, but somehow, it will still surprise you with its suddenness. As you are minding your own business, doing the laundry, tweezing your eyebrows, packing the school lunches, at some point you will turn around and discover that you have just wrapped half your life and the questions, "What have I accomplished?" and "What should I do with the other half of my life?" will start to keep you up at night.

Additionally, wondering what eye cream and other anti-aging products one should use at this juncture will also take up an inordinate amount of inner dialogue and emotional space in your heart. I'm a little ashamed to admit that, but there it is.

My mother, in her familiar wisdom, keeps telling me that "it's just a number." I know this, but it still feels like a life monument of some sort. And, even though I try to tell myself that "forty is the new thirty," I can't decide if this is denial or not.

So, the question lingers, "What am I going to do now?" Because, with that turn of the calendar, there is an urgency that appears, a sense of time speeding up, of second chances being fewer and of every choice carrying just a little more weight than it did before.

I feel less angst than I did in my twenties and thirties. And yet, I can't help but still feel a nagging at the back of my mind that I need to figure some things out now that I have presumably made it to the middle of my life.

So far, I haven't figured anything out.
But, I did make a short To-Do list, because I'm good at lists. Here it is:

Grow in Wisdom 
Do the Things that Matter 
Create Something Beautiful 
Beat Back Suffering
Learn How to Rest

Honorable mention goals: make better snack choices, stop reading celebrity news, and call my grandma once a week.

Other suggestions for living a better life as a middle-aged person are welcome.

                                                                                                           Where I'm currently doing my pondering.