Before We Turn to Stone

I turn 30 in a little over a month.

In the greater scheme of things, this is not a particularly dramatic occurrence. 30 is, to be sure, a milestone birthday of sorts. It is to be celebrated, like all birthdays. But it’s not a fireworks and foie gras event here.

And yet…

I am so different from who I was a mere 9 or 10 years ago. Astronomically, earth shatteringly, mind bendingly different. And that was the plan! I looked at 30 from 21 and thought I had it all figured out. A plan, a certainty of fate. I was going to be a whole new person! An adult. Have it together.

And here I am, a whole new person! An adult! But it is nothing like I imagined it. And many times I still feel like that wisp of a an alcoholic 21 year old girl.

And that’s fucking with my head.

SO

I have been planning a road trip. To the ocean. All by myself.

I have no idea when it will happen. but it will happen in my 30th year.

And i will use the time to screw my head on. And become who I am supposed to be.

And celebrate.

20 and 12

20 things about me:

1. I am left handed like our current President but not like our last President.

2. I am convinced that the baby we lost between the bird and the bug was my long hoped for daughter. I have no facts to back this up but it is a comfort.

3. I bite my fingernails and nothing works to stop me. I’ve tried all the remedies and it seems I am destined to have stubby chewed nails.

4. I find the act of blogging to be ridiculously self absorbed and always feel slightly ashamed of myself when I finish an entry. And yet here I am. Again.

5. I love seeming to be organized, but in reality I am not so much. Because of this I am generally 5 to 10 minutes late for everything but stage management and wedding gigs. And the common areas of my house are tidy but my closet looks atrocious.

6. I bake on Thursdays. I don’t know why but it seemed the best day to do it. I generally make at least 1 loaf of bread.

7. Accepting Christ inspired me to get another tattoo.

8. I lived in London for a while when I was 23.

9. I’d really love to live there again before I die.

10. I am almost always humming a song.

11. I want to finish my Bachelor’s degree in something completely different from what I started, from theatre to Sustainable Food Systems and Nutrition.

12. Before I was a mother, I was, in no particular order, a Development Assistant, a bakery cashier, a waitress, a barista, a scene shop overhire, a stage manager, a ballet dancer, and a receptionist for a non-profit housing agency.

13. I am on the staff of our church’s college group. It’s my mission to talk to these young women about Jesus and feminism and finding oneself in Christ before church culture really starts to wear them down.

14. The part of my body I am forever stymied by is my hair. It’s currently about 16 inches long and I want nothing more than to chop it back down to 3. When it was short I fantasized about long hair. Stupid hair.

15. I once had my septum pierced. It looked rockin’ cool. Because of this I have discovered that women love nose piercings, men feel meh about them.

16. I will add up to 8 lemon slices in my iced tea and no sugar.

17. At one point (read: before I had a kid) I wanted to have 8 children

18. I have 8 tattoos and plans for at least 4 more. I have to like a tattoo idea for at least a year before I’ll put it on my body. I have broken this rule only once…see number 7.

19. I will re-read a book many many times if I like it. I thought this was a normal thing to do but it turns out most people don’t do this and that makes me sad.

20. I thought that eating canteloupe naturally made everyone’s tongue burn and itch but it turns out I was just allergic.

 

12 things I want to do this year:

1. Go back to school

2. Celebrate the new school year with my new kindergartner with a family feast

3. Develop a study on Ephesians 5 for my college girls

4. Renew our vows on our 5th wedding anniversary at our church

5. Celebrate my 30th birthday with a fancy party

6. Visit my in-laws in Michigan over the summer

7. Begin exchanging letters with a friend on a regular basis

8. Help the bird to identify all the letters of the alphabet

9. See my father more than once every few months

10. Get the husband a ticket to the F1 race in Austin

11. Write in this here journal at least twice a week.

12. Continue on my quest for femininity by wearing makeup, finding my style and feeling comfortable in my own skin.

 

In an absurdly self centered attempt to jumpstart my writing this year I give you a list of 20 and 12 things.

 

a lovely change.

I don’t “do” resolutions. I did and never stuck with them and the remnants of my traditional Catholic upbringing allowed for enough guilt that I abandoned the practice all together. We pile up our resolutions, a massive wall of desire and drive to protect us from the unknown ahead. A whole years worth of defensiveness right there at our finger tips…and I have 2 kids so I’m entirely to exhausted to maintain that level of can do spirit.

So the simple focus of this exercise appealed to me. Choose a word. Live it. Write about it. Share it. At the end of the year, reflect. Perfect.

I turn 30 this year, I’ve begun to figure out what looks attractive on my figure, on my face, I have decided to go back to school, and my eldest child enters kindergarten. Mostly small things, inevitabilities that will probably pass with the same grace all these mile markers have, but put together in a 12 month span the shape of my year began to form. I began to see myself as needing to become more malleable, to become more focused, to become more organized, to become more in tune with myself…are you seeing a common word there?

This year I choose the word becoming.

An odd choice for a woman about to enter her 30th year, surely I should have become the person I was supposed to be by now? But when I read the definition it suited perfectly what I needed for this year, a year of change and a year of moving toward the woman I want to be.

So here’s to becoming this year.

Here’s to prosper and grow, to flourish and flow. And to you, faceless reader, I wish you a word to guide your year. Something as lovely as becoming…

 

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