second set of baby steps: growing up

Showing posts with label growing up. Show all posts

Friday, July 31, 2015

uncertainty

This week was our second-to-last ceramics class of the session. My sibs and I have quite a lot of clay left, a few unfired pieces, and hardly anything glazed (with the exception of Asha, of course, who already has a handful of beautiful, interesting items). We started to feel the pressure.

I spent most of the class bopping around from table to wheel to the waxing and glazing area, bopping past Maria who was doing mostly the same thing. When we found ourselves in the same place there was a lot of "I don't really know what I'm doing..." and "uhh..." and "I feel like I should have this more under wraps."

And then, of course, suddenly -- it was the last half-hour of the second-to-last class and I had barely done anything. I had allowed myself to become paralyzed by uncertainty, and missed out on some potentially valuable time. I'm also pretty certain something awful will happen to my last-minute haphazardly glazed test tiles and experimental pieces. But no sense in worrying about them now.

* * * * *
This isn't a phenomenon that's isolated to ceramics. I do the same thing at work, when I have an unfamiliar task in front of me; the same thing at a networking event when I don't know who to talk to or what to say; the same thing at dinnertime, when I am making a new recipe and feel myself starting to get hungry; the same thing in relationships when I start to reach a turning point or uncharted territory; the same thing now that I'm planning a wedding and have no idea how to talk to a band or an equipment rental company or a caterer.

And yet I consider myself a fearless adventurer. I have done incredible and incredibly stupid things, whether because I couldn't pass it up or to prove a point or just to say I've done it. I have accomplished so many things I'm proud of and crossed into uncharted relationship territory over and over again and whipped up some deliciously interesting dishes and cocktails. How do I get from Point A to Point B? How can I justify my Fearless Adventurer status while being regularly paralyzed by uncertainty and fear?

* * * * *
I suppose there's always the whole "Courage isn't the absence of fear" thing. And there's Chris, a Guiding Angel, who used to do things in spite of his fear. I can find my motivation for every situation, prove to myself and whoever else that I can do it, and I will. And there's just procrastinating until I can't put it off any more.

Fear is a built-in self-defense mechanism, so as long as we are alive we can't really get away from it. We gradually get comfortable with things that used to be unfamiliar, the things that used to scare us. And then a new unfamiliar thing swoops in to take its place. Every next day and next moment is bursting with uncertainty, but every next day and next moment is going to come no matter what we do and we will do with it what we do. For me, I have to allow myself those moments of hesitation, because for every hesitant moment I have another moment where I sally forth into the mental fog. There is no sense in kicking myself for wasting time because I didn't know what to do. All I can do is shrug it off and put another finger down in the next game of "Never-Have-I-Ever."

Maybe someday my kids, or at least my nieces and nephews and mentees, will look at me and marvel that I always seem to know what I am doing; that I'm not afraid of anything (I'm even working on not freaking out in the presence of bees!)

Fooled ya.

Friday, July 17, 2015

psyching myself in

Last summer at a writers' conference I happened to meet two missionary kids, a brother and sister who grew up in Grenada.

M., the sister, and I have kept in touch and started a Meetup group for third culture kids in the area. We had our first meeting last Thursday and it wasn't super well-attended but we had one new person that none of us personally invited! I consider that a success.

I'm not usually the first person to show up anywhere, but that's one of the things I'm working on... Even if it means setting a start time half and hour beforehand and being 20 minutes late. (Which is what happened last Thursday.) All that to say, I found myself at the coffee shop alone when the only person I didn't know on the RSVP list showed up.

I used to feel like I was an extrovert; in college, I was engaging, and I could hold a conversation with anybody -- I could hold court. Since moving here and starting my job, I've felt a bit out of my depth. I'm the quiet one again, like I was in elementary school. And lately, I've been feeling pretty stressed out when there's pressure to start conversations with people I don't know very well, or at all.

But in this case, when the only person on the RSVP list I didn't know showed up, I started asking questions and getting to know him, and it was great. I felt, if not entirely comfortable, as though I had something to offer that was of value.

* * * * *
This brings me to a few points:

J is always telling me he doesn't get why I'm so self-conscious talking about my personal history and my travels -- 'where I'm from.' I just don't ever want to be that person who talks and talks and talks about all the cool places I've visited, all the while stomping down the people around me. But sometimes it turns into me devaluing my experiences and/or psyching myself out about having a conversation with anyone.
Psyching myself out is a very real stumbling block. Most of the time I don't even catch myself doing it, but one of my colleagues once said something about 'listening to the words as they're coming out of my mouth' and I realize I am guilty of doing that: worrying so much about my phrasings and nuances that I lose touch with the actual conversation I'm having and my core message.

Step one is always recognizing the problem. Once I realized I psyched myself out, I put a little bit of energy into psyching myself back in. Focus on listening to the other side of the conversation, not what's coming out of my mouth. Find a core commonality, even if it's something as simple as standing in the same square yard of space. In the case of the TCK group, it's the shared difficulty in answering the question, "Where are you from?"

It's not easy, but I'm learning to 'turn it on' when I need to be engaging, and to push my insecurities to the side. I might not say it right 100% of the time, but who does? We're all human -- and I'm beginning to realize that most people, no matter how old they are, or how apparently charismatic, have some insecurity about starting a conversation with an unknown person, or about holding court in a crowd. Our success at doing so has something to do with training, little to do with personality, but mostly to do with giving it a shot in the first place.

Friday, July 10, 2015

feeding the multitudes

These days, as my first post-college cohort of married friends and same-aged cousins is beginning to have their babies and post about it on Facebook, I find myself feeling ill-prepared to have children.

That's not quite the right way to say it; I mean, I definitely want kids at some point... And I don't even think I'd be an awful parent at this point in my life, theoretically. It's just that it feels like enough work keeping my own head above water to imagine being responsible for another tiny little life. And what if I have twins?! (It's on both sides of the family...)

I have to give my mom props here. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've been taking a ceramics class with my siblings this summer. (We just started spinning on the wheel this week and I'm in love -- but that's a story for another day.) Because I live less than 10 minutes away from the studio, everybody gathers at our place on Tuesday evenings around 5:30 to eat and drive to class together.

And usually, on Tuesdays, J has bro night -- also at our place. Which means there are 6 hungry young adults hanging in my living room, hot and ravenous, half an hour after I get home from work. And four of us have to eat and wash our plates and leave the house 45 minutes later.

You probably see where I'm going with this, but let me break it down.

Week One:
I forget this is happening and text Jason before leaving the office: "Just remembered my sibs are coming for dinner tonight and we have ceramics at 6:30..."

So I rush in from work, throw together a cold quinoa salad which we eat hot because there isn't time for it to cool, and J graciously grills a few extra burgers to share with my siblings. (And by a few extra, I mean ten.) We also split three fresh ears of corn between the six of us. We are 5 minutes late to our first class, and I have a pile of dirty plates to wash when I get home three hours later.

Week Two:
I give Jason a little more warning this time, and ask nicely; so he (again, graciously) makes three extra pounds of grilled chicken, and grills up the last of our potatoes and a sad pile of waning wax beans (i.e. the only thing grillable in our crisper). I'm sure the boys are still hungry, but my hands are tied.

Week Three:
Asha texts me in the afternoon asking if we can have pizza for dinner. I breathe a sigh of relief and reply, "Done. That's exactly what I was thinking for tonight."

I order two large pizzas online before leaving work, and pick them up on my way home. (I beat most of the people back to my house that night...)

When J and I order pizza, we spend about $13 and eat it for breakfast AND lunch the next day. I spent more than twice that much on pizza that night, and it was gone within 20 minutes.

Week Four:
Monday night, 9:30 p.m. J and I are on our way home from eating dinner at my parents' house. I remember, in exhausted desperation, that we have to somehow feed 6 people in less than 24 hours, and the only thing in the fridge is Guinness and hard-boiled eggs.

I wake up early on Tuesday and -- on a whim -- take chicken thighs out of the freezer, chop up some potatoes and dump it all into a slow cooker with a can of diced tomatoes and a bunch of herbs.

I put on rice when I got home, and it all turns out pretty well. I feel like I nailed it for the first time since ceramics started -- and everyone washes their own plates.

And then when I open the tupperware of leftovers at lunch the next day, it's all potatoes. The chicken got completely polished off the night before.

* * * * *
I don't want it to sound like I'm complaining; like most of my life's struggles, I'm looking at this as an exercise. And it's such good exercise that I have to give my mom mad props for feeding us breakfast, lunch and dinner when we were little (four little kids under the age of 6) and, when we got older, coming home from work and making dinner every day and half the time eating only what was left on our plates. And not only that, but a good percent of the time, everything got ready at more or less the same time. It's not as easy as moms make it look.

I am enjoying this exercise while it lasts, and it's already made me stronger -- but I will be glad to get back to my regular struggles of worrying about what the two of us will eat every night of the week (except the two nights where our moms still feed us), plus leftovers for lunch. And for the time being, I'm happy not trying to feed a small, brand-new human (or two or three) who will probably refuse to eat and/or will throw most of the food at me. I'm sure I'll be delighted about it someday, but right now I've got enough on my plate.

This Friday evening, it's a G+T, a pickle, a chocolate chip oatmeal cookie and a PB&J. And Jason made the sandwich for me.

Friday, June 19, 2015

the mission: ceramics 101

"Are you the Swansons?" - our ceramics teacher as we rolled into class 5 minutes late. (Not bad...) "Are you a band? You sound like a band."

Now that's a new one. But it's particularly funny right now since our running joke for the summer is that we're going to start a family a cappella group a la Von Trapp Family Singers. We opted not to share that joke with out new classmates and teacher; best not to get their hopes up.

"Trapp Family Singers 1941" by Trapp Family Singers
Metropolitan Music Bureau, New York. Photo by Larry Gordon.

We went around the room and introduced ourselves: the high school English teacher trying ceramics out for fun; three women who took the class before and got addicted; Thom, doing this to hang out with the siblings; me, who made some pinch pots back in first grade and hung out with potters in college; Maria, the music person whose idea it was to take the class in the first place ("so when we all hate it we know who to blame!"); and Asha, who of course got the hang of the clay long before the rest of us could even put two pinch pots together and keep them inflated.

By the end of the three hours, Asha had a lion head ready to be fired; Maria made an abstract "war bird"; I had a lumpy eggplant that stands on end and Thomas created and collapsed a pineapple. ("I don't really need a bunch of clay pineapples collecting dust.") After 8 weeks, we're all hoping to have a mug to show for ourselves.

This is what my siblings and I do for fun. The other day J and I showed up for dinner and my dad was tiling the upstairs bathroom, Asha was picking up rocks from the creek to line flower beds, Maria was stitching a T-shirt quilt and Thomas had plans for his latest project laid out in graph paper all over the living room. "Now you know why I get so irritated when the TV's on all the time," I said to J.

One summer, we scripted, set, and produced an adventure movie filmed across four cities in Northern India. The final product was 20 minutes long, with complicated character relationships and a cast of six.

my inspiration: pottery from friends

I value that creative outlet, and the creative community in growing up that way. It's a hunger I carry with me everywhere I go, even now... Even though I dedicate so little time to creative endeavors these days. I envy people who do art professionally, like my full-time writer friends here in Delaware and my college friends now doing MFAs, publishing chapbooks, selling handmade jewelry or bowls or clothes in towns around the country. I envy people who have the energy after work to do anything more than throw together a (roughly) balanced dinner and maybe a fancy cocktail - my art of choice these days.

I caught up with a friend last week who just left her job in preparation for moving and starting grad school over the next few months. She said, "Now that I'm not working, the TV is hardly ever on. I just find a lot of other things to do."

Out of desperation, I added that it serves its purpose; it's an easy way to get a story fix at the end of a full day.

As a kid, I watched only PBS until I aged out around 10. Sesame Street taught me how to read, and Wishbone taught me how to love it; Mr. Rogers taught me imagination. When we had filled our TV quota for the day, we would run downstairs and build a "magic Barney bag" full of scavenged craft materials, or put on a sock puppet show, or set up our own mini-Olympics in the living room. We built tiny towns of mud-and-twig huts in the backyard, elaborate Lego cities for our plastic animal figurines, box and blanket forts for ourselves. Whatever we saw on TV, we replicated in real life. After a movie, when the credit music came on, we all leaped up from the couch and started dancing. When I read a great book, I started writing what I hoped would turn into a great book.

That is the luxury of childhood, and now I see it as such. When I have kids, I hope I can pass that on to them... but in the meantime I'm on a mission to find creativity in the adult world.

Readers: let me know where you all find your creativity, and how you make time and space for it!

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

an interview about the second set of baby steps

Three or four months ago my friend Marina and I recorded an audio interview about the blog. Marina studied business and political journalism in Moscow, and hosted a radio interview show when she interned in broadcast media. When she said she wanted to think about starting a podcast, and asked if she could interview me about second set of baby steps, something stirred in me.

A flashback to the KSTO days, maybe, or to conducting interviews for research projects; a chance to collaborate on a creative project; an opportunity for some guided reflection on my blogging experience, just as I was starting to think about wrapping it up.

We got sidetracked in the middle and started talking about gender roles, and the changing experience of gender from our grandmothers' time through our mothers' to ours; because this is a relevant and ever-present element of adult life. But we got back to the blog topic at the end.

I remember driving home, feeling energized by the creativity and interactivity of the process and focused in where the blog was headed in the last few months, in how I wanted to approach it. I really believe that evening was a turning point in this project, and it started to take on a different life for me from that point forward.

So I am glad, now, at this final moment, on the second-to-last week of the second set of baby steps, to be able to share it with you. A big thanks to Marina for questioning me (constantly, off and on the air, even when I don't exactly welcome it) and for recording and editing our audio to be posted here.

2. One night this week Katy, Jason and I were eating dinner at the kitchen table and heard some weird noises coming from the front of the house. We were understandably a bit spooked, but instead of freaking out we each grabbed a random houehold item (steak knife, ShakeWeight, chopsticks) and did a sweep of the house to make sure there were no intruders. Like group therapy, only... Funnier.

3. Luke and I picked up some coffee last night and went for a drive while listening to 80s music. We had a blast and it was so relaxing!

4. Play-Doh! I bought some the other day and have spent so much time playing with it. I forgot how nice it is to create. Another relaxing and fun activity.

5. Humphrey Bogart movies. This week I've watched a few of his films again that I haven't seen in a while: To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Key Largo. The dialogue is so wonderful, and Bogie is always so handsome and rugged :)

6. MN weather this weekend! It's been really autumnal here. The daily high is around 70, and it's been such a lovely weekend! Perfect for outdoor activities.

7. Babies! J's niece is starting to make noises and really react to her environment, and she is SO. CUTE. Also a really cool dad with a stroller decked out in glow sticks at the Electric Run last Saturday.

8. Instagram. I know, typical of me, the social media behaviorist, to include a platform on the good things list. But let me tell you that it is the only one I want to check and update when I'm not working. I find it beautiful and simple and expressive in a totally different way from anything else I've ever seen. And mainly, it's fun and it's cathartic, both to post and to scroll through the news feed. Check me out @claradetierra.

9. This bluetooth keyboard I am using to update the blog from my phone! So cool. A coworker-friend picked it up and gave it to me this week and already it is 100 times faster and easier to type and to update. Plus it is thin and compact.

10. Kitchen and home goods stores. I feel so boring and grown up, but this is where I spend the most time and money shopping these days. Today Jason and I went to Bed Bath and Beyond looking for a spice rack and a few other things, and of course had way too much fun comparison shopping and making lists of things we would want in our over-extravagant dream life. (The glamorized $350 Margaritaville-branded blender, for example.)

Here's to a peaceful week for all of us, dear readers. No matter what happens, though, you can count on a full list of 10 good things next week!

Thursday, July 25, 2013

promised: 6 things i learned from being robbed twice

On Monday I hinted that I might write about the movie Promised Land this week. I had a basic outline planned out and was good to go, and then after work Jason called to tell me that our house had been broken into and robbed. This is kind of hard to ignore when I'm writing, so I guess I won't be writing about the movie this week.

Lesson number one: things don't always go according to plan. What's that they always say? "The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go often awry." (From a poem by Robert Burns.) You'd think I would have learned this one by now.

I had a characteristically complicated set of plans that were thwarted by this, my second robbery since moving to Delaware less than 2 years ago. Not to mention the hard-earned, if still slightly shaky, sense of security living in the city not far from infamously drug-ridden streets and neighborhoods.

Oddly enough, I almost feel a little less scared now. More city-hardened. Broken in (ha, ha, get it?). The guy one house down, though, told us he's lived there since 1999 and hasn't known of any break-ins on our block until now. He did say a lady once had her purse snatched on the corner, though, and was screaming for help. He said he and two other guys on the street came out to see what was going on, and one of them chased the guy a couple blocks before catching him and beating him up and bringing the purse back.

Lesson number two: city security. The cops told us "negative" on ground-floor window units and gave us a few other security measures we should put in place. So we're working on that.

In our case, they said, somebody probably was looking for pills or drug money, or both. People walk around pushing on AC units and if there's give, they push it in, fill their pockets and take off out the back door, to turn over the goods for cash or crack a few blocks away.

Lesson number three: we are unbelievably lucky in our family, friends and neighbors.

Talking to our neighbors after the fact, it was clear that people on the block keep an eye out for each other. Call it nosy, but I have had a growing feeling that, when it comes down to it, we all have each other's backs.

When I got off the phone with Jason after work and found out what had happened, I first called my mom to tell her I probably wouldn't make it over for dinner, and why. She said she was sorry to hear it and did I want them to come over. I said I would assess the situation and get back to her. Then I called Katy and told her to come home.

So I went home to find Jason and his brother watching a movie and drinking beer. And Joe stayed until Katy got there and then he left. So there we are waiting for the cops to show up (apparently there have been a lot of shootings in town lately, so they have been busy) and there is a knock on the door, and it's my parents standing there with a crockpot full of stew and some bread. "Want dinner?" they said.

A little later my sister, who was the first person to discover that my parents' house was robbed last September, showed up to give hugs and make jokes. And Jason's parents checked in on us every hour or so, and the morning after.

Family is so important, and ours are the best.

And then I told the girls at work and they said, "Are you suppressing your emotions or are you really this calm?" Since then they have been offering to make plans with us and have been texting periodically at night and in the morning to make sure we are feeling OK. And friends have been checking in and doing the same.

Friends are so important, and ours are the best.

Lesson number four: you never know what people are dealing with behind their eyes. Yesterday I decided to go to work and really dig in, try not to get distracted, act normal. You might never know if you saw any of us that something had happened. Because we don't always have the luxury (or the crutch?) of being able to check out and freak out. We have no clue what kinds of things people deal with on a daily basis. The people driving next to us, making our coffee, delivering our mail, sitting in the next office. The show must go on.

Lesson number five: when my parents' house was broken into almost two years ago, I had the most stuff stolen. I was so angry because I had just come to this new place, and it wasn't treating me very well. It hit me with an earthquake, a hurricane, tornadoes, a break-in, and a manhunt, all within the first 3 weeks of my arrival. I took it so personally.

Jason was the first to discover the robbery on Monday. He just moved in officially a week ago, and he got hit the hardest as far as the value of things lost. I asked him, "Are you ready to move out?" And he said. "Yeah..."

And so was I, two years ago. But in retrospect, how glad am I that I stuck around? I am not one to run away. I am determined -- to a fault -- to overcome. And I have, for the most part. I have kept my job and, in fact, advanced within my company. I still love what I do. I have made a lot of friends and discovered a lot of things I never would have otherwise, and taken advantage of a lot of opportunities. And I met this great guy who moved in and almost immediately got robbed. The literary richness of this story is not lost on me. I only hope that there are as many good things to come in the next two years for him, and for all of us, as there have been for me.

And that no one gets robbed two years from now. There is no curse! We just live in a city.

Lesson number six: this is the kind of thing my parents told me, when I was little, that only happens to people once. I know now that this isn't true, that some people have a lot of bad things happen to them and some people have hardly any. I know from experience it's easy to feel like Job.

But I caught myself thinking that yesterday and scoffed aloud. Not everything is great, and in fact I have been heard to say more than once lately that the world is a pretty rough and unpleasant place a lot of the time. But given what we have to work with, I've got it pretty good. And to compare myself to Job? Well, that guy lost everything. And I'm definitely not trying to jinx it by thinking I'm at that level. I've got a lot to be thankful for.

So I didn't write about Promised Land. But part of what I was going to say about it is that things don't always turn out how we think they will, and life delights in surprising us. And that we don't know people until we sit down and listen to their stories. And that the world is hard, but sometimes all the more beautiful for it.

So maybe I did write about it after all.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

when i was 24...

I’ve mentioned The Girls At Work in probably too many posts. Since we’re all around the same age, and in other obvious ways our lives overlap, our lunchtime conversations provide a lot of fodder for this blog.

Mostly we talk about our roommates, and pets. Then we talk about what we do for fun, and lifehacks for doubling up professional dress with casual wear, and working out (or not). We talk about money (mostly, how much we don’t have). We talk about food: fitting grocery shopping into our busy schedules, eating healthy, eating out.

On Monday of this week, while we slogged through all this heavy problem-solving, The Other ‘ara (we get mixed up all the time at work) told us how her skinny, blond cousins, young parents in their 30s, talk about being 24. “Our twenties were a blast,” they’ll say, “but let’s be honest-- we might be less fun now, but we’re not that much less fun. And we sure don’t miss living paycheck to paycheck, living in scary places because it’s all we could afford, going out every night...”

So I started thinking: how will we look back at these lunches and our standard fare, our weird roommates, hangovers, being perpetually on the lookout for the loves of our lives? And I thought about a comment my Gramma made, how she appreciates my blog because I actually listen to the wisdom of my elders, and incorporate it. And I remembered how much I love hearing other people’s stories instead of just writing my own all the time, and I thought I’d better ask some more experienced people to recall being our age.

This post goes out to The Girls At Work, especially Sara.

I’ve also mentioned before how my mom’s experience has been different from mine. The major reason being, she was married at 22, and had me at 25, and so the time I’m spending now getting to know myself, she spent figuring out “ourselves” -- the We-factor. Being married and being a "new adult."

“When I was 24, Papa and I did everything together. We didn’t have any money... But everything was an adventure.

“And then when I was 30, I had three kids. When I was 29, Maria was born. And when my mom was 29, I was born. So that was significant to me. It felt like things were coming full-circle.

“But I didn’t feel grown up until I was about 45. Life was still an adventure and I felt like everything was so new. Now I feel like... I heard this lady say in the store that she wished she was young again but knew everything she knows now. I like the wisdom that I’ve gained and the insight that I’ve gained over years of experience.”

And now, she’s starting to take new kinds of opportunities to get to know herself. In some ways, I feel like we are on a similar page now. It is comforting, though, to hear that she just started feeling grown up recently. Maybe that means we’ve actually got some time to figure things out!

“Figuring things out” is a theme that came up over and over again. More specifically, “I hadn’t really figured anything out back then.” I was talking to J about a friendship I’m frustrated with right now, and he recalled an old friend he couldn’t even speak to for years after a bad roommate experience in college. “I eventually figured it out,” he said, “and so will you. But it will probably take you half as long. Hopefully.”

I was pleasantly surprised to get a similarly clueless impression from one of my most influential college professors. It is strange, no matter how many times I hear it, to learn that “grown-ups” I so deeply admire as capable human beings have or have had their clueless moments. It’s comforting, too. And it often makes me respect them more.

“24. Given that it was half of my life ago, I don't recall that much about my emotional state at 24. I was living in Japan teaching English and happy to be meeting some really great people. I wasn't in a romantic relationship. I read a lot, mostly novels and stuff about Asian politics. I learned how to ski. I intended to keep moving and traveling.

“I didn't know it at the time, but I was making progress on figuring out who I was. Of course I also didn't realize that some big surprises were in store for me in that regard over the next couple of years -- the major wrong turns in my life hadn't happened yet.”

Reading this response now makes me wish I had dug deeper for “the major wrong turns”... But I guess that's a conversation for another day! This part is a little intimidating... What if we have some serious wrong turns ahead of us?!

On the plus side, I guess, we still have a shot at turning out as well as Tom did.

And maybe it just takes that long. My friend Emily, who I met while she was doing AmeriCorps in Delaware last year, is not really that much older than I am. But the way she talked about being 24 struck me almost as though she were a different person commenting on someone else a few years younger.

“So as a 32-year-old, I can't really speak for anyone else because everyone matures at different rates. At 24, I had the time of my life. I had the best group of friends and I had a sense of identity. HOWEVER, I was also extremely dramatic and immature. Every kiss was some epic romance and every hurt feeling was a betrayal. So if I knew then what I know now, it would be to be a little more pragmatic, a little more responsible, a little more sober and a lot less angsty. I thought angst was 'cool' and therefore never tried to grow out of it. I also cared way too much about appearing hip, together, and cultured. I didn't realize how fake it looked. But that's just me. I was extremely immature for that age. Like I said, everyone is different.”

So I asked, what was the catalyst that makes you look back so critically? What sparked the shift, and when did it happen? What do I have to look forward to?

“There was no ‘one’ thing that contributed to the change, but moving to California to be a couch- surfer knocked a lot of it out of my system. Just not living in a place where everyone understood me and enabled my quirky, youthful ways-- that forced me to grow up a lot and realize the difference between friends and drinking buddies, and other important lessons. Delaware was another one for similar reasons.

“But it's been a process and it's one that I am still in the midst of.”

I love that she boiled it down to realizing the difference between friends and drinking buddies. It strikes me as such a beautiful way to express something I’ve often heard about growing older -- that we learn how important relationships really are to our happiness, and, if we’re lucky, how to have functional ones. Distinguishing friends from drinking buddies seems like a pretty good first step.

So maybe we really just don’t “grow up” until we’re 45. But I wonder-- what is the catalyst? And how do we really know that we’ve done it, we’ve hit our peak, we’re grown up!

One of my dad’s best friends, Dan (my dad, also called Dan, was his best man back in 1986), both offered an answer to the “catalyst” question and threw the whole idea for a loop.

“Around the age of 24...I say ‘around’ since that was so long ago (I am 52 now)...I would soon to meet a young beautiful lady who later accepted my marriage proposal, after she said ‘maybe’ and made me wait for a few weeks! For me, finances were ok but certainly not great so there was some tension about finding/keeping the right job. I had gone back to college a few years after high school.

“In some ways, I think I thought I had things figured out fairly well but I didn't really focus on the little things. I had a job that I liked and my employer kept promoting me so I felt rather encouraged and optimistic. I do recall thinking from time to time about my parents who were in their early 50s. I wondered if I would be so stuck in a rut when I get to their age as far as career, family, doing boring church stuff, etc.”

Is this like me, now? What do I have to look forward to? Read on...

“Little did I know how much children change the picture!! Liz and I have five children. The first child was an adjustment, but the second and third not so much. I guess we already had gone through the initial adjustments/shock of a major lifestyle change with the first. We waited five years before having children, but it was all an amazing experience....

“Our fourth child was the one that really threw us for a curve. Not that he was a difficult child but more from the logistical point of having so many car seats and transporting four kids places was not easy.”

AHA! KIDS! THAT’S the catalyst!

I’m actually in a bizarre position right now where I’m watching J’s older sister and her husband with their new baby, and they seem pretty much exactly the same. That is weird. At the same time, she (the baby) is having a major, discernible impact on their lives, on their social schedule, their sleep, their role in the extended family. But if they weren’t grown up before, they’re no more so now. And if they were before, then, well, there goes that idea...

But wait, Dan’s not done:

“I can honestly say that looking back when I was 24 year old, any thoughts of what I might be doing or how life might possibly be now were nowhere close to how they have turned out!

"I have heard people comment that at my age I would be ‘settled in’ to routine and life would sort of cruise by or that I would begin to slow down after turning 50. Nothing is further from the truth! Life is busy. I still have four boys living at home. Three of them are teenagers and one 12-year-old.

“My ‘career’ is just beginning to launch off into the great unknown...and that is amazing and exciting. It's all a God thing! At age 24 I really did not know what my ‘passion in life’ was. I really didn't realize what that was until about ten years ago...in my early 40s. My passion is praying for people! That alone began a period of years of learning, failing, stumbling and grasping this.”

Things are new! There are still learning curves at 32, 48, 52! Things happen that are so unexpected and they throw us for a loop again and again, and we take wrong turns and make new discoveries...

Now, The Girls At Work and I, my classmates and my friends, are looking forward to getting our ducks in a row, getting our shit together, figuring things out. Having our own place, being married, making the salary we want and having our own benefits instead of living off our parents’. (In the meantime, Mom, Dad, Obama, we appreciate it and it really is awesome of you to share yours with us until we’re 26!)

5, 10, 25 years down the line, we will definitely have gained some perspective and some wisdom, but who knows what we will think about who we are now and what we are doing. All we can do is our best, and try to be happy.

Bring on the adventure!