I am about to turn…a number…It’s greater than thirty and less than seventy and for some reason it feels like a number that a man with a beard wearing a pair of overalls should be. Not a poor, innocent girl who was just standing there minding her own business. It’s so hard to believe this happened. I really don’t want a beard.
When I was a little girl, I always wanted to be thirty-six. I thought that sounded mature enough to get any job, to wear pencil skirts, to have a husband who wears suits, and to have two adorable children. A thirty-six-year-old woman runs in high heels, wears red lipstick and dances around town with a little perfume dabbed behind each ear.
When I finally turned thirty-six, I did have two adorable children and a husband who wore suits but I hadn’t quite lost the baby weight so a pencil skirt was entirely out of the question. Also, it seemed silly to run in heels after a four-year-old. The one time I wore red lipstick, my son took one look at me, burst into tears and said, “You look like a monster.”
Forty-six came and went too, and then… some other numbers. My daughter grew up and moved to LA, and my son moved to France. And yet I still haven’t grown into that vision I had of the woman in the pencil skirt. I grew into something else: A woman who is greater than thirty and less than seventy, who’s dancing around her room, because her two grown-up (and still very adorable) children came home for her birthday.
