It’s the tail end of Mum Day now which, this year, segues neatly into my bday tomorrow. For those of you counting, I’ll be 37. Yep, 3-7. Three years away from the big 4-0 or as some like to think of it: death. Because 40 is just old.<\/p>\n
Silly really. I don’t feel<\/strong> like I’m in my late 30s. I’m not sure how the late 30s are supposed to feel, but I know I definitely don’t feel old. I know I don’t look my age either which I guess is cool, but even if I did, I don’t think one’s age is something a person should be ashamed of. One of the fine actors in the Buffy Between the Lines phrases his birthday greetings like this: “Congratulations on your continued survival!”<\/p>\n I dig that. I’ve managed to live for 37 years. I’ve never broken a single bone or had a life-threatening health issue. Never been in a bad car accident. I’ve raised a child by myself (a pretty damn cool one too) and put myself through college and have been lucky enough to find a career in a field that I absolutely love. Plucked up the courage to transplant myself and Shannon in the UK for a while and I have zero regrets about that. I have a fabulous family that I love and who love me, had a great childhood free of trauma (unless you count the bell bottoms I had to wear in junior high when everyone else was wearing leg warmers and wishing they were Pat Benetar), and I have good friends.<\/p>\n 37 years of that kind of life is pretty cool if you ask me.<\/p>\n Of course I’ve had bad times too. Pretty traumatic divorce followed closely with the death of my father (technically stepfather, but he was my dad. It’s hard to refer to him as stepdad but I always feel I need to qualify it to avoid confusion when I talk about my very much alive and well biodad that I’ve reconnected with and is part of the above-mentioned awesome family), a couple of other fairly hard breakups, and I’m not gonna lie, it’s damn hard to raise a child on your own. Then losing mom was.. Well suffice to say I’m still working on dealing with that. It’s been a little over 7 years now and I still can’t dwell on it. I can talk about her, and I can write about her<\/a> but I don’t want to think too much about what happened. But couple that with losing my aunt to cancer shortly after mom and ugh. Hard.<\/p>\n So my life’s not been all roses. And no life is. It’s all of these things – good and bad – and influences and people and events that shape who you are. And that’s a good thing. But despite 37 years of good and bad, it doesn’t FEEL like 37 years. And so when I turn 40 I don’t think I’ll feel 40 either. It’s just a number, which is, I suppose what most people say when they reach these years. But to me, it does just feel like a number and isn’t really indicative of how I should think, feel or behave. I think if I want to go out right now, find a big rain puddle and jump in it, I will \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n So having said all of this, I’ve decided to quit letting it bug me when these young whippersnappers at work tease me about being old. It doesn’t bug me when my friends and family do it, so I’m not sure why it bothers me when someone I don’t know very well does it. Next time it happens, I think I’ll just yell at them to get the hell off my lawn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s the tail end of Mum Day now which, this year, segues neatly into my bday tomorrow. For those of you counting, I’ll be 37. Yep, 3-7. Three years away…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[38,34],"tags":[55,56],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ukmelia.com\/ridiculousthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}