I recently read
a piece on how to make the most of your 20s. Being 26 I thought I should
probably read it because I still have 4 years to make the most of it, and turn
things around if I really had to. Upon reading it I realized I did everything wrong. Apparently your 20s
should be spent focusing on yourself, not having a serious relationship and essentially
being Miss Independent. Since I haven’t in fact been living under a rock, I get
this sentiment. I do. I even wrote a poignant poem in Junior High entitled “I’m
an Independent Eighth Grade Girl” – it is as riveting as you would imagine and
basically expressed everything this article did.
But alas, I fell in love and we
decided to get married right out of college when I was 21 and rather than spend
the first 5 years focusing on us and establishing my career we had a baby 11
months after our wedding day… and then we had another! So here I am 26 years
old, married for nearly 5 years, with 2 kids. And according to most articles I
have read and movies and TV shows I watch I am not experiencing the true joys,
sorrows and thrills of my youthful 20s that I should. The world sometimes makes
me feel like I should be sad about the decisions I made, that I am missing out
on unlimited freedom, crazy nights and the joy of youthful independence, but I
don’t feel sad- I feel full.
I posit this to the world: I would
take the joy of a dance party with a 3 year old and a giggling baby all in
pajamas to the joy of dancing with strangers in a club, and although there
truly is no pain like child birth au
natural or the sensation of an unexpected Lego in the small of your foot or
seeing your child sincerely sad to say goodbye to you, I am grateful to experience these things in
my 20s because I think it has made me a less self-centered person than I would
be otherwise.
I am not a proponent of getting
married young per se. I just feel
that sometimes the message we get in our 20s is so one-sided and makes little
room for the possibility that there just might be other ways to find happiness.
I simply grow weary of hearing the same recycled platitudes about how to be an
awesome twenty-something year old: Be single! Be irresponsible! Career is
everything! My goodness, there are other ways to live it up! Here I was just
hoping to suggest another way- how very Generation Y of me.
