stop expecting it to look like what you thought it was going to look like

i just had a birthday. a birthday marking the beginning of another decade of my life and rendering me an age i've been dreading for years; a milestone birthday if you will. thinking about how i had always pictured my life to be at age 30, i have to laugh. nothing is the way i thought it would be. i guess in some naive time of my life, i assumed by the age 30 - an age that seemed so old and ancient to me at one point - i would have the guy, the ring, the house, the job, the bank account, the kids. i assumed i would be settled into a blissful state of being where dating and money problems didn't exist. i assumed, at 30, i wouldn't be waking up with hangovers and/or strangers, wondering when/if i would have another date or relationship, or glaring hatefully at the happy couples that seem to infringe on every facet of my daily life. i assumed i would be a ball-busting career woman with a doting husband and adorable kids. i assumed i would find perfection.

i guess i should have known at the tender age of 6 that i was going to have issues with men and my idealistic view of my life in general. my cousins and i used to spend summers at my grandma's house. it would take me an entire post to explain how we made grandma's life miserable during those summers. i believe she once referred to watching over us as "herding cats", which is a pretty accurate description. in some of our calmer times, my cousins and i would pull out all of grandma's catalogs and pretend we were planning our weddings. we would pick out our colors, shoes, bridesmaids dresses, hairsyles, and wedding dresses. we would sometimes choose our china, our stemware, and other household gifts for our registries. but what we delighted in the most - aside from picking the diamond ring, of course - was choosing the groom. straight out of a catalog, i tell ya - can't go wrong there. with their dazzling white smiles and their perfect hair, these men offered picture perfect marriage material. sometimes we would fight over who got which groom; fights i usually lost simply because i was one of the youngest and my older cousins felt they got first dibs. i would pour over the catalogs, looking for what i thought would be the perfect man for me. at age six. i was doomed.

fast forward and here i am at 30. no mail order groom, no more catalogs to illustrate the false picture of perfection. years ago i abandoned the idea of the dream wedding and decided marriage isn't really important to me. years ago i decided that i prefer to live my life for me, not for a husband and kids. i don't need the perfect house in the suburbs or the waterford crystal. (ok, i'm not gonna lie - some waterford martini glasses would be fabulous) i'm not 6 years old anymore, planning a perfect catalog life. so what should i expect my life to look like down the road? i have no idea. and i kind of like it that way.