On my way to a mid-life crisis.

I keep waiting for maturity to hit, and I fear I may be waiting in vain. My mind still feels like it's eighteen years old, while my body approaches thirty with a back-burner type of panic that flairs up every time I sit with my legs underneath me and then stand up and have to hobble for the first few steps while the bones in my feet realign themselves to their proper position. Maybe it's not age - I could be gaining weight. At any rate, I was standing in the shower the other day, (because who doesn't do their deepest thinking while standing in the steam letting their eyes go out of focus?), and I began to think about the phrase, "You're only as old as you feel". This is where my 18 year old brain comes into play and I begin to have a two part dialogue with myself:

"Does feeling mentally immature count as young, or are we talking about physical feeling?"

"I don't know. Maybe we mesh the two?"

"Yeah, maybe. So let's see; If we feel 18 mentally and 50 physically, (of course, we can only imagine what a 50 year old body feels like, but it seems a good guess), then do we average out to 34?"

"I think so! We've been robbed of 5 years!"

"Hmm. Isn't a woman's mid-thirties supposed to be her sexual prime?"

"I think you're right. That might not be so bad. Let's google that later."

"Okay. I'll try to remember. With age comes forgetfulness, you know."

"Good point. You know what else? If we're aging that quickly, then we really ought to quit wasting time shaving our legs."

So here I am, trying to accept the fact that while I thought that I had another 6 months of being in my twenties, I'm actually already in my thirties and didn't know it. Thinking back through my youthful years, I conclude that I've spent too much time worrying about things that are small, too much time sitting on my butt doing nothing, and not nearly enough time living.

I can regain my twenties before they are gone by waking up every morning as though I had a choice, (and that it was to get out of bed), and by letting my kids take me back to the important things.

I took my three oldest kids to pick out pumpkins tonight, and they agreed that today was the "best day ever". Just because of carving pumpkins. I wanted to let their enthusiasm seep into me, and I have to say that I loved squishing my fingers through the mushy, orange pulp, and chanting that "Ethan is a sissy!" with Cameron when Ethan refused to touch the guts of his gourd with his bare hands. Sometimes I am amazed at how simple life is when I let the kids take the lead. All the bad "what-if's" are replaced with simple curiosity. Every bothersome chore becomes unimportant. Excitement is tacked on to both ends of everything. While we stood at the window and watched the candles in the jack-o-lanterns flicker in the night's breeze, I decided that I don't care how old I am in real life or in a hypothetical equation - I just always want to feel young enough to think that carving pumpkins could make for the best day of my life.