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Tomorrow is my 34th birthday. Every year on my birthday, I, like many others, take stock of my life – where I’m at, where I want to go, and what’s happened in the last year. Becoming a mother has introduced a new twist to this yearly exercise: Now I think not only am I achieving my goals for myself, but am I allowing the little angel to have the opportunities and freedom to become her own person?
One issue top of mind for many women in their mid-thirties is fertility. Though I had no problems conceiving and carrying the little angel almost four years ago, I worried that I would after a bad bout of endometriosis in my late teens. The advent of birthdays brings many women a reminder of their struggles. Mary, who has suffered from endometriosis herself, writes:
It's my birthday on February 9th. I'll be 27 years old. When I was in my early 20s, I figured I had so much time ahead of me. Now I'm in my late 20s and time is running out for this endo-ridden body. I'm going to get myself a cake for my birthday and eat it. I guess in light of not being able to have that option with life decisions, I can at least do it for my birthday. Though every year passing reminds me more and more of one dream slipping through the cracks, I will do my best to celebrate it. I just find myself at a loss on how I'll do just that.
Others, like Sandi realize they waited more birthdays than they thought they would to have children, and it wasn’t such a bad decision:
With age comes wisdom. Wisdom is great. It’s too bad that by the time we get the wisdom, it’s too late to be useful to us. For example: Now I know that I should have worn earplugs at all those drag races. Now I know that I should have worn good quality shoes when waitressing. Now I know that you really should bend at the knees to lift. . (I also now get the meaning of, “It’s gonna rain, my back is killing me”).
Some women, like me, include starting a family as a goal only to find once they have that baby, some of their other dreams are called into question due to financial or time constraints. I recently reconnected with a college friend through social media to whom I hadn’t spoken in almost nine years. We’d met in a college writing class, and he was interested to find me still writing with a three-year-old underfoot. I thought about what he said for a while, because it’s precisely having that three-year-old that finally made me realize that if I didn’t put my professional dreams first, nobody else in my life would. There is a need, after becoming a mother for me at least, to hold onto those parts of Rita that were Rita before I also became a wife and mother.
Bonnie shares on her own birthday:
Now, this year, having recovered from serious sleep deprivation, I have surfaced. How do I know? Last month, as I was thinking about my birthday, I got that ol' lovin' feeling again. I wanted to be out. During the day. Where I could feel the sun, smell the air, and see the clouds. And I wanted to have a quiet, slow coffee with pastry at a favorite bakery. The old Bonnie was back. The Bonnie that was not mommy. The Bonnie from yesteryears.
I was a bit shocked that I was still there. After a haggard week of failed potty training, I felt like a run-of-the-mill mom. Tired, head full of worries, behind on my laundry, and a grocery list that was just too long.
In the end, though, with age comes a sort of wake-up call that life is not the oyster waiting to be seized they all told us it was (bless the feminists of the seventies, but having it all turned out to be harder than we originally thought), but something about which how we feel is determined largely by our participation and effort. Life feels much more meaningful twenty minutes after you leave your shift at the soup kitchen or driving away after comforting a crying friend over lunch. Age destroys feelings of entitlement as we realize we aren’t really any better or more deserving than anyone else, but it gifts us
