I started the day with a run. It's a good way to put a positive spin on the day, and I love that I have time this semester to run in the morning. This still cracks me up: I'd never run so much as a city block before I turned 40, and now I actually have to use running as an incentive for completing less desirable activities. As in, "If you grade five papers, then you can go for a run." And it works! No one is more surprised by this than I am.
During a normal semester I have to save my run for an after-work activity, which means it's highly vulnerable to further postponement due to unforeseen complications: missed the bus, need a new binder, need a ride to X's house so we can do homework together, etc. etc. (I know I could plan a 5 a.m. run to escape these complications, but I also know how pointless it is to make plans I have no intention of keeping.) This semester, though, I've promised myself that running will be one of my priorities since, after all, healthy body = healthy brain. So after the kids get on the bus, after I've had a sufficient amount of coffee, I put on my running shoes and plug in my earphones and get busy.
For the last few days I've been kicking off the morning with the Dixie Chicks' "The Long Way Around." It always puts me in a rebellious frame of mind that makes me want to run faster and harder. If I could go back in time and talk to my younger self, maybe give her some advice, the first thing I'd do is slap on the headphones and make her listen to this song. Then maybe she'd know that it's okay not to be getting married at 18--it's not a defect you need to rise above, or a condition you need to justify with excellent grades and turbo-charged career plans. You can just be 18 and figuring things out for yourself and, believe it or not, that's okay. You're okay.
But that's a hard thing to know when all the people who have been your closest friends are making concrete plans for their futures and you have no idea what your future looks like. None of the people I knew back then are still married to the same person, and since my husband and I will be celebrating 20 years in December, I guess I'll count that as the blessing that comes of having been a wallflower at that particlar party.
The love of my high school life died not too long ago. I had no plans to see him again--I hadn't seen him in at least fifteen years--but it was still sad to know I never would, to know there will be no bumping into him sometime while I'm visiting home, no catching up, no moment of seeing that we both ended up in a better place for having not made an earlier mistake. He married young, had kids young--and, as it happens, died young. So maybe we all just live our lives at different speeds. Maybe there's an internal alarm clock going off silently in our brains, letting us know when it's time to do various things. Maybe those of us who start our families when we're 30, not 20, aren't waiting for anything--we just haven't heard the signal that it's time to get going.
There are many mothers my age or older these days. That wasn't the case for my mom, who got married and had two children in her early twenties, lost one of those children in her later twenties, then went on to have a second family, of sorts, when my brother and I were born in her early thirties. My friends always mistook my parents for my grandparents; my father was only in his 40's when I was in grade school, but apparently that was late to be a father and none too soon to be a grandfather in the 1970's.
I'm glad I had more time--I'm glad I took more time--to be single and childless, then married and childless. Taking the long way to marriage and family let me find the one person (and I'm still convinced there is only one person) to whom I could be happily married for the duration, and let me become a mother when I felt ready to take on that role, not when I thought it was expected of me. I only wish there were a way to tell every teenage girl that there's no need to be in such a rush. Just take your time, look around and figure out where you are. Then you'll know where you want to go.
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