Friday, May 5, 2017

"Better Liquor, Better Living Rooms"


I used to be envious of early-twenty-something me. 

It may have been a time of transition and uncertainty, as I sat perched on the precipice of true adulthood, but good lord things were so much tighter back then than they are now. Things stayed where they belonged, hangovers could last for days without consequence and my bedtime beauty regimen didn’t take thirty minutes each night and involve things that required batteries and could easily be mistaken for sex toys.

Early-twenty-something me didn’t care what others thought not because I was confident with who I was but because I truly went about my way in the world with an “I don’t give any f*cks” attitude. Friendships weren’t deep but they were aplenty and when we got together, it wasn’t for a Wednesday morning spin class but rather a Friday night bar crawl where we didn’t care how much we drank, who we drank it with or who paid for it.

I envied this carefree, sometimes careless free-spirit who could be selfish with her time, her money and, well, her beauty (as if it would always be “this easy.”) If you had asked me back then what my thirties would hold, I’m fairly confident I would’ve said something like “Oh, I’ll totally be married with beautiful, impeccably behaved children living in a beautiful home carefully curated by my interior designer. I’ll still wear bikinis on the beach because I’ll have a bangin’ body, nothing will have changed and everything will be expensive and extravagant.”

Oh to be so naive again.

Here I am, a little more than twelve years later sitting in a hair salon working very hard to keep a handle on my prison roots. I have three beautiful children and we live in a beautiful home (Ding! Ding! Ding!) but come over on a Tuesday morning and you’ll find that home littered with signs that there are children everywhere. My interior designer (ha, ha, ha) is named Pinterest and she shops mainly at TJMaxx, HomeGoods and Target on a major B-word (budget) because when you have kids as little as mine, you can't really  have nice things until they go off to college.

The vacuum is stranded in the middle of the first floor, its cord spanning three different rooms. Socks are strewn about as far as the eye can see and if you look hard enough, there’s dust balls in every. single. corner. The sink is full of dishes that I’d like to say were from the extravagant breakfast I cooked that morning but the truth is, they’ve been there since last night. My dog finally got a bath and haircut this week after several months of smelling like a NYC subway. 

I love my children as much as the next mom but I also enjoy when I send them off to school in the morning and pull away from the curb in car line two kids lighter. I always, always crawl into bed with each one of them after they’re asleep each night and breathe them in. I also post creepy sleeping pictures of them to Instagram because that shows everyone on the Internet just how much we really love them.

Do I still pine for the days when I was a carefree, sometimes careless early-twenty-something? Maybe. Maybe I’d go back for just a day- and spend most of that day naked because had I known what kids and aging and gravity do to your body in your thirties, I would’ve spent way more of my twenties naked. Just totally buck naked. I might’ve taken pictures, too, for posterity’s sake (or to give to my plastic surgeon down the road).

But the whole truth is that I don’t really miss my early-twenties at all.

I’m living the life I spent most of my twenties dreaming about and while it doesn’t look as neat and white and shiny as it did in my head, it’s even better than I could’ve imagined. I still give little to no f*ucks but not because I feel like I’m invincible but rather because I genuinely love myself as I am. Even if it means I splurge on beauty paste to brighten my under-eye bags and meet my girlfriends at spin class every Wednesday morning to sweat off the poor parenting decisions I made the day before.

Speaking of friends, I have some of the greatest women in my life surrounding me and they all came to me in my thirties. I thought I would never find my “tribe” or whatever the trendy word du jour is for those women who offer to take your kids when they see that look on your face, who love on your kids like they do their own, who commiserate with you and celebrate with you the trials and tribulations that motherhood is all about. The kinds of women that you see in movies and read about in books and blogs and witness in those tiny Instagram squares but I found them and they found me when I wasn’t looking. Together we love deeper, laugh harder and everything we do is because we firmly believe it will better ourselves, our family and those around us.

One of those girlfriends recently got me hooked on a TV series starring Hilary Duff called “Younger.” It’s the perfect blend of thoughtless comedy that goes great with logging treadmill miles or putting up your thirty-seventh load of laundry. There’s a scene where one of the main characters returns from a suburban stay-at-home mom’s book club where she was forced to go in a hasty attempt to rustle up some excitement surrounding an unpublished novel. Her twenty-something cohort asks her how it went, assuming it must’ve been so lame to hang out with a bunch of pinot-grigio-guzzling sex-starved housewives but much to her surprise, her friend retorts, “it was really great. Better liquor, better living rooms.”

In that moment, it hit me. Actually, it hit me at the same time a rogue NERF dart whizzed by my temple. That’s precisely what my thirties are all about-  better liquor and better living rooms. 

In stark contrast to my twenties, a decade (mostly) fueled by shitty wine, rail drinks and dive bars, my thirties have introduced me to wines that taste like feelings other than “I’m just-out-of-college-broke” and “my-boyfriend-dumped-me-to-find-himself.” When we have midday play dates we drink the thirty dollar bottle of champagne on a Tuesday because we can and because we want to, some of us still reaching for the cheap stuff not because we have to but because we don’t give a shit and we enjoy it. 

And we do so in a living room that looks less like a serial killer’s grandmother’s basement and more like the pages of the design magazines we flip through in car line. That’s, perhaps, the moral of my thirties. We don’t give a shit and we enjoy it.

My thirties have truly been a gift to me and even though my metabolism sucks and my girlfriends and I group text about things like “the best Spanx to make you look twenty again” and “why do my kids hate me” I wouldn’t trade these last several years of awkward adult self-discovery and self-awakening for any of the nonsense that I thought was important in my twenties.

What’s even better? I hear forty is the new twenty… 

Here’s to the future, my fellow mid-thirty-ians. We’ve still got it and so. much. more. than we know. 



Instagram
Follow on Bloglovin

7 comments :

  1. Girl, yes. I sometimes (often) lament my thirty-SEVEN year old self and then I remember that I have complete control over the checkbook and my kids are old enough to make sandwiches and tuck themselves in. These are the days. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I totally feel you. I love my life so much right now and I wouldn't change a damn thing about it. Turn up on a Tuesday, cheers to you!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Amen, sistah! You couldn't pay me to go back to my early 20s! I'm happy right here on my perch in my mid 30s!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great post! Especially when I start to wish I was younger because I feel so lame these days!

    ReplyDelete
  5. If you have a minute, I’d really appreciate it if you took a look at Emily’s Virtual Rocket. This is a serious newsblog which has been taken from e-newspapers and e-magazines from around the world, with an emphasis on transgender issues. Also, with his election, I look for articles which critique Donald Trump.

    I hope you enjoy this. Please paste the following:

    emilysvirtualrocket.blogspot.com

    If you like it, please consider putting it among your favorite blogs. I would greatly appreciate it.

    Sincerely,

    Emily

    ReplyDelete
  6. Couldn't agree more! I'd love to cheers you with some fancy champs during a play date! 😘

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm waiting for moments alone next year when one goes to preschool. Grocery shopping with one kid sounds glorious. And I'm all for better liquor!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for reading ILYMTC. If you have any questions about a post or want to get in touch with me (or any of the cast of characters here at ILYMTC) email me at iloveyoumorethancarrots(at)gmail(dot)com.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...