I spent three days last week with some good friends from my old hometown. We went to the beach. It was. . . nice. It wasn’t like old times, that’s for sure. One of them is pregnant and the other is trying to be.
It was, I thought, a time to celebrate the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. So, I admitted to being sort of sad that the days of our youth were behind us. They both piped in and said “oh no, we are sooo thrilled that we’ve got this new era and that we have children to look forward to and blah blah blah blah blah.”
Okay, I’m not saying that I want to go back to drinking until 4 am and falling asleep in an alley, if I ever did that in the first place. I like my life now, I am excited at the prospect of being a parent (however I get there). But, there’s something to be said for the end of a fairly significant chapter in your life – the one without kids and heavy responsibilities. The one where you get together with your gang at the spur of the moment for no reason whatsoever.
Am I the only person who feels this way? Is everyone else just more ‘ready’ for adult life than me? I am sort of sad that we are getting older, and while I look forward to seeing the shape my life takes in future years, am I not supposed to look back fondly on what’s come before?
Maybe I feel this way because I’ve come to a place where I realize life doesn’t always work out the way you’ve planned. Maybe because my friend got pregnant her first month of trying, she assumes that everything else will work out like that as well. The other one thinks it’ll be that easy for her also, and I hope it is, but when you struggle to get to the next phase of your life, maybe you don’t take any of them for granted.
