I grew up in a small, soccer-mom town, filled with preppy prints tucked into pastel trousers. I graduated in a class with fewer than fifty people. Most of us came from well-to-do families and had a picturesque set up from an outsider’s point of view. You know like, both parents happily married, the white picket fence, the well-fed Labrador retriever, and a tire-swing for Sunday night boo-boos and double-daring your sibling to swing just a little bit higher. Life was pretty serene and cookie-cutter until I suffered a traumatic loss when I was 13: my mother passed away.
As you may imagine, my view on marriage changed pretty quickly. The idea of marriage or finding, "the one" was no longer ideal or as cliché as the sun setting over my little New England town. As I moved out of my prepubescent years, and into the turmoil of my teens, I began experimenting with my sexuality. I liked the idea of having sex a whole lot more than actually committing to a person. I suppose I could have been pegged as polyamorous, but the idea of being politically correct doesn’t really exist in a pool of hormone raging high schoolers, so I was simply labeled as a slut.
Since about 90 percent of my high school fled off to universities far from home, most of the high school sweethearts broke up. Hence, I never took on the notion that we did indeed find our swan at a young age. I did however have hope that maybe one day, I could settle down and have kids before my uterus ran dry, but not before I traveled.
Fast-forward 18 years later. I am 32 years old, childless, unmarried, and homeless — that is to say, I don’t have a mortgage, and I am not yet engaged to my partner. That is okay. Why? Because I have traveled the world, expanded my mind to see past the small lens I looked through for so much of my youth. I explored my sexuality, and fell in love with a woman and now a man from a completely different side of the world. I left security in the United States and moved abroad, I am still here, without a car, without a mortgage, and without a phone number. My life is simple.
The truth is I have never felt so free in my entire life.
Do I want kids someday? Sure. A house? It would be nice. I don’t dwell on these things, even though society tells me to. Whether it was the tragedy of losing my mother at a young age, or it was always my destiny to not be overly concerned with a Pleasantville family concept, I can’t be so sure. I do know however, that life is pretty freaking spectacular right now, just how it is.
Cheers to 32.
