Thirty is Perfect

Thirty. Is perfect. As I knew it would be. Even as I waited impatiently for my legs to grow, to bend over the ledge of the vinyl seat of our car, I knew I was headed for thirty. My hopes for this age were as vague as any seven-year-old's who dreams of a kindhearted husband who will feed her ice cream for dinner and children who will go to sleep in small playpens and eat everything she feeds them from her miniature kitchen.

When I was still so young my toes pointed to heaven as I sat, I wanted to teach. Graded papers with words my novice fingers could not yet form.

I wanted to make a home. A two-story house on a hill. Preferably at the end of a cul-de-sac with neat and even boxwood hedges. On this I was not vague. Amy Donovan's house was [d] All of the above. And she seemed rich.

I wanted a family. There would be a husband involved. That was necessary. And children who adored me and took naps while I ate hidden stashes of Necco wafers.

Money would not be a worry. Nor would madmen loose in the neighborhood. We would all befriend Jesus and attend a church that did not meet in a YMCA.

I would have friends who weren't allowed to listen to Madonna either, and we would talk about our gardens and the flowers that best attracted butterflies while our children would swing happily on a swingset our husbands had erected in a collaborative effort.

Still. With dishes that remain on the table unto petrification and children who may get out of their beds after they have been neatly sewn up for the night. I agree with vinyl-seat-girl. Thirty is worth dreaming about. It has a three in the number, so it is already worth my time. And the zero that follows gives it a dignity it cannot claim otherwise.

Thirty is officially an adult. Official. I remember feeling every time my Michelle called with an "I'm pregnant," thinking, Now, we're real, live adults. As if her embryonic accomplishments somehow merited my own maturity.

This evening, as Brandon and I bent over Anali's cover-tucked body and simultaneously and repeatedly kissed her cheeks in a "Goodnight, and good luck" fashion, I thought to myself. This. is. it. We're here. I'm happy. It's perfect.

And I smile at the little girl in the back seat of the wood-paneled Ford, and whisper. You're right. It's perfect.

I have to write. I felt it for a few minutes last week. Long enough to create a blog. Then again in the car with the kids in the backseat and Brandon lost to earphones and the steering wheel. Now, it's a pressure in my chest, not unlike Dad might have felt in those days he thought he was having esophagus spasms.

Spasms they were not.

Now, when I'm unloading the weekend's leftovers, and repacking the pantry, it's a vintage ice cream making bucket that hurts. It makes me ache with remembering, even while I can't fully remember making ice cream with my dad, or my mom, or ever. It's more of a longing of what might have been in those days when I was a child and Dad was alive. We might have made ice cream.

This weekend, my regret is that I never allowed him the aging pleasure of camping with me and my kids. He asked. I postponed. And I get a sinking feeling now when I move toward something beautiful.

It's summer again. And I want to show him sunny places near my mountain. And I want to float in the river like I'm told he did. In that life he lived in his year of discovery. The year he road a motorcycle east, the motorcycle we sold on Craigslist. Sometimes, I hate myself a little.

"She keeps volumes of poetry beside her bed. She'll go there. Flannel pajamas, lamplight, the spare and exquisite execution of language. Maybe later, another piece of cake" (Berg, 2009, p. 146).