today i am 33 years old. i’m not saying this to beg for happy birthday wishes. no really, i’m not. no, stop already. JUST STOP SAYING IT ALREADY! i’m also not trying to say that i’m old and decrepit (i realize how ridiculous this sounds after hearing last night women in my current class who are still a couple of years away from 30 talk about how old they are–whatever). i’m just trying to say, i’m 33 years old today, and i still don’t know what i want to be when i grow up. i don’t think i’ll ever know.

i’m 33 years old today and most of my female friends have a career, have some sort of thing that they do or have done up until they started to have babies. even some of those women who have babies still have a career or some sort of thing that they do. i’m 33 years old today, and all i can say is that i worked in a temporary administrative assistant job for almost 7 whole years in order to pay back school loans and then about 4 years ago quit that job to have kids. so i’m 33 years old today and i have 2 boys–that is one good thing in this lament. but this day and age, when being a mom just isn’t enough and most people ship their kids off to day care and continue on with their career or whatever it is that they do, only being a mom doesn’t seem like enough to me either.

so i’m 33 years old today, and i’m a stay at home mom by day and a graduate student by night. i’m in the process of getting a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing at Chatham College. when i say that (or type it, in this case) it gives me a sense of pleasure. when my friends say to me, “wow, i don’t know how you do it all” a sense of pride begins to swell in my breast. feeling the danger of that, i am usually quick to say, “no, no, i only take one class at a time. it’s really not like that.” because really, it isn’t like that. when it was just sebastien and i, it fit perfectly in. i could concentrate on seb whenever he needed me to, and when he was asleep, i could read and write to my heart’s content. but now i have two boys, and it’s not so easy to fit the school work into my day without encroaching upon my time with them. i thought getting a master’s degree is where it’s at for me, but now it feels too hard, too much like i’m trying too hard.

so i’m 33 years old today and on the verge of being a grad school drop out. two semesters of content courses have kept me too busy to write anything besides things for those classes so i’m feeling less then a writer than usual which means, i feel like i’m totally wasting time and money on this useless degree. (don’t argue, you have to admit that it would be pretty useless for a non-writer to have an mfa in writing!)

i’m 33 years old today. and i’m thinking that this would be a great long essay to send to some magazine devoted to women who are mothers and who wonder what else they are supposed to be doing with their lives. so that makes me think maybe i am a writer after all, because if i am not a writer, i wouldn’t have thought about it. but then, why would women want to read something about someone who is exactly like them? so then, i think, even if i am a writer, i’m not out there breaking boundaries. i’m not pushing the envelope. i’m not broadening horizons. i am a cliche.

i’m 33 years old today.

Posted on November 15th, 2006