From the day I found out I was pregnant (around April 7th, I believe), I’ve been constantly calculating: my age + 9 months, my age + 18 years, that scary number compared to the ages of other people I know who already have kids. What that number might have been if I hadn’t spent the last two years being marginally employed and watching The Wire twice all the way through. In terms of the baby as a milestone, I am 15 years behind some of my peers, 20 years behind my former students who had babies while in my 10th grade class!
The age thing doesn’t bother me so much as the fact that I’m three years from starting my career as an OT (the University of Washington agreed to defer my admission by a year so I wouldn't deliver a baby in the middle of a final exam). If only the baby were already here, I could get a head start on its first year of life, so instead of having a nine-month old when I start grad school I’d have an 18-month old. Actually, if time travel is on the table: If only I had gotten pregnant during my first unemployed stint two years ago! If only I’d visited the Career Center in college back in 1998, and learned how useless my English degree would be fifteen years sooner! If I had made different choices, I might be an OT with 10 years of experience and a growing retirement account. I know it could drive me crazy to think like this about everything, but every once in a while it hits me how far behind I am. I will be an old mom. There’s no getting around that. I will be taking my kid to preschool with parents who are ten years younger than me, yet are ten years ahead of me in their careers, home ownership, and establishment of a polished mom “look,” while I still wear the shorts I bought at Target in 1996 and scour Craigslist to furnish my rental apartment. I don’t feel middle-aged, but I almost am!
But back to the time machine. The benefit of having watched countless ‘80s movies and sitcom episodes centered on this very trope is that if I could go back and alter the trajectory of my education and career choices, I probably wouldn’t have met Ben, or many of the friends I’ve found along the way whom I now treasure. If I hadn’t moved to Albuquerque in 2000, before which I foolishly turned down several jobs because they didn’t meet my idealistic liberal arts snob standards for “doing good in the world while being intellectually fulfilling,” I wouldn’t have met the Willi (more on them in a future post). If I hadn’t dropped out of my PhD program at Duke in 2003 and moved back to Albuquerque in 2003, I wouldn’t have met Ben. And that would bring us, ultimately, to the disappearance of little Cletus/Cotton/Beaux-Rhys from the fading photo I would be clutching in my own disappearing hand as I tried frantically to cling to existence while Doc tried to fix the Delorian.
Maybe I should embrace my future status as an Old Parent (henceforth to be referred to as an OP), and start planning the many ways in which I shall mortify my child and eventual teenager. She will probably have friends whose parents weren’t even alive in the ‘80s, so imagine their delight and wonder when I pop in a VHS of Troop Beverly Hills at her first sleepover! It will be an anthropologically educative experience, as will carpool rides when I play my Backstreet Boys or Dave Matthews Band CDs. (Yes, CDs. I just can’t get the hang of my iPod.)
