It's a Friday night that I sit here, waiting for my husband to get home from a work trip and pondering the strangeness of life.
For one thing, I have a husband. I've been married for almost two years, and I still can't really quite wrap my mind around that particular development. And not only do I have a husband, but I'm married to the boy I had a silly crush on when I was seventeen. If I could go back in time, find myself in the quad where I would frequently "run into" him accidentally on purpose, I would love to deliver that bit of news to seventeen-year-old Angela and see the look on her face.
Another weird thing? I own a house. My name is on a title for a HOUSE. I mean, only grownups own houses right? So what does that make me? I certainly don't feel like a grownup. I don't feel any different than that seventeen-year-old Angela--and if we're being really honest here, ten-year-old Angela.
One of my favorite family stories revolves around my grandmother on my dad's side. In her 80s, as she was slipping away from us into the haze of dementia and I suddenly realized that there was no way that deep, nut-brown hair color was real as her last dye job faded away and she didn't bother with a touch up, in a moment of rare clarity she said, "You know, sometimes I look in the mirror and wonder how a sixteen year old girl got trapped inside this old lady's body."
In just a few short months, I'll be turning 27. I have a husband. I own a house. People my age and younger are having babies. On purpose. And, in most cases, no one seems to think they're making an unwise decision. Sometimes I pick up a shirt, or a dress, or a headband that I really love, but I put it back down because really it's too young for me.
I wish I could pinpoint the exact time in which I made the transition from girl to woman. Maybe then it would feel more real that all of this is really my life. But maybe that leaves the portal open.
Maybe you never do have to grow up. Not in a Peter Pan way--yes, there are responsibilities that must be accepted and certain social mores that should generally be followed--but sometimes maybe it's okay to wear a headband with a bow or to put off laundry for one more day in favor of a play-date with your friends.
Because isn't that the part of being a grownup that you always dreamed of when you were a kid? Making your own rules and eating ice cream for dinner? Growing up is a weird and strange evolution, and I know that the next sixty years will fly by in what seems like minutes and then I'll be the one sitting in front of a mirror, staring into the wrinkled face of a stranger.
But I think as long as you always know that there's that sixteen year old inside of you, you'll always be okay. You'll always still be you.
"You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old."
~George Burns
