Perhaps this is a mid-life crisis, with much less drama. Here I am, thirty. All my friends are thirty or about to be thirty. We are all married, or about to be married. We all have a kid, or are trying to have a kid (not me, them), and the conversation has very much become ‘ovulation kits’ and ‘work-out routines’ that should be adopted pre and post pregnancy. It’s all very normal, I guess, for thirty year old, married folk, like us. We have our jobs that don’t take up too much time, which leaves us afternoons to gossip and swap stories that we’ve heard about this or that product that makes you skinny, or happy or younger-looking. We roll our eyes at the early twenty-something females who look so much older than us because they’ve burned out on partying and cigarettes and one too many vodka tonics. We feel sorry for the older ones who haven’t found a husband, because on an island, the pickings just get slimmer, the older you get. We are the quint-essential ladies who lunch.
Not dinner. Lunch.
Our evenings and Sundays are spent at home, with our husbands. At times, we feel the need to cook. Juicy gossip is all the juicier from the distance we’ve put between us and it. All that unstable stuff got left behind in our twenties, and this knowledge leaves us with a mixed feeling of smugness and sadness. We are stable. Totally, utterly, stable. (sigh).
So we tea.
We put on nice outfits, and make-up and blow out our hair, to tea. It is lovely. We all eat salad with grilled fish or chicken. We drink our tea black. It is the high-light of our week. I look forward to it, like I used to look forward to concerts and Broadway shows.
I suppose it’s all so normal. So why does it make me feel so odd?
Perhaps because I am not a person who likes too much free time. Maybe because my whole life has been fast-paced. I’ve been studying and taking tests and sending applications and earning degrees. I’ve been applying for jobs, and temping and interning and holding down side jobs, waiting to make some real money. I’ve been hustling, writing novels, and getting married. I’ve been renovating our home.
And now? I tea. I lunch. I wait around for something new to come on TV. Or a new book to come out.
So I ask you, where is the dirty in my thirty?
AND NOW FOR A JUICIER, MORE EXCITING TIME OF LIFE….THE NEW YORK CATCH, THE NEW YORK SOCIALITE, THE NEW NEW YORK, THE RED ROCK CAFE & MID-LIFE WIFE
La Dolce Vita 