By luck or by design, I've managed to work a few major life milestones in before society-dictated "deadlines."
Friday, Stephen and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. We got married three days before my 30th birthday -- not, as some suggested, because I was desperate to get married before I turned thirty but, instead, because I was desperate not to have to endure a thirtieth birthday party, so we had a wedding instead. It was a great day.
Our first year married was tough, with two miscarriages and the death of Stephen's ancient old hag of a cat, Neruda. The next two years, we celebrated the time we had together as a couple to enjoy each other's company, but we were saddened that no baby was on the way. Last year, we were at the trepidatious end of my last trimester, nervously hopeful of a happy ending.
We got our happy ending in September, and, as I said to Stephen on Friday (as we prepared for an evening out! with dinner! and a movie! and a wonderful sitter, in Auntie Cathy, for Anna to enjoy!), it was our fifth anni-versary but our first Anna-versary. Our beautiful, smart, funny girl.
As a gift, we bought ourselves (or, err, Anna) a ridiculous contraption of a play centre with literal bells and whistles. It takes up the entire of the available floor space in the living room. But when Anna tested the floor model at the store, she shrieked with delight, and we were sold. All our proclamations that we would not be materialistic parents distracting our baby with noisy contraptions melted away as she found first the bells and then the whistles and then sounded them all at once.
Today, on my thirty-fifth birthday, with a five-month-old unadjusted to an early change to Daylight Saving Time and brightly and noisily working the bells and whistles, I realized that I had met the other society-imposed deadline for having babies before you're 35.
Tune in another time, not my birthday, to hear me bristle and rail against arbitrary dates designed to put social pressure on women and to make us feel guilty and/or inadequate, too old or too young. Don't get me started on pregnancies being called "high-risk" the instant a mother turns 35. Just don't. It's my birthday, and I'm putting politics aside to read cookbooks and talk on the phone.
