Me, thirty years ago
Last night, I lost the back of one of my earrings. The carpet in our bedroom tends to bury small pieces that size, and after fifteen minutes of crawling around on the floor with a flashlight, I told Wes (who was also crawling on the floor with a flashlight because he’s wonderful), “That’s just great. I’ve had those earrings for TEN YEARS and never lost the back of either one of them before!” I couldn’t believe that after ALL of those years of keeping track of them, that one tiny piece was lost. Moments later, I finally found it, and all was well.
Except… ten years? That can’t be right. My parents had given them to me for my twenty-first birthday, and as I compared my age now to my age then, I concluded, again, that it has indeed been ten years since I turned twenty-one. Ten years since I was getting ready to finish up college. Ten years.
Well, I’ll be.
In my mind, thirty-one doesn’t sound old. Well, it kind of does. But it doesn’t sound old enough to
have been out of high school for almost thirteen years. And it doesn’t sound old enough that college was well over a decade ago.
The more I got to thinking about this, the more troubled I became. I just generally think that kids in college right this minute are my generation, but as I did the math, I realized that an incoming college freshman, age eighteen, is (prepare yourself for this!) young enough to be my child. That’s right. I’m old enough to have a child in college. True, I would have been a really young mother, so let’s add a few years, just to make it more realistic. I could be the mother of a freshman in high school. What?!
I was thinking about age earlier in the evening, about how my girls are closer to their high school years now than I am to mine. And that when I think about fun things I used to do as a teenager,
I don’t think of myself doing them anymore but of my girls doing them one day soon.
I know thirty-one isn’t old. But the more I think about it, I start thinking that it’s not all that young either!
Oh, fleeting youth. It’s a good thing I’m not placing my security in you. Because you are gone,
gone, gone!
How about you? Ever had that “Wow, I’m old!” revelation?
Jenn Faulk 
Great post! And, at my age, every time I look in the mirror, it's a “Wow, I'm old!” revelation. And it never ceases to shock me that I'm actually a grandmother.
By the way, how in the world did you add sepia tones to that darling picture of Emma above? Wow!
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When I was subbing and kids would ask my age, I would tell them I was as old as MTV which came on the air in 1981. Of course, they weren't going to go look it up, so my secret was safe 🙂
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31 is definitely not old, but it is strange how fast the years go by. When I'm with the youth I feel pretty young but then I realize I have two kids and that a lot of things have changed since I was a teenager…and that was 7 years ago!!!
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Wow! A person might think that's a picture of Emma…she looks exactly like you!
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