Being Thirty: Then and Now

In a celebratory mood after completing Laurie Wagner’s five-month Wild Writing Teacher Training, I open a Zoom room to teach my first class. It is June 21.2022.  The class members, all in their early thirties, personify a clear-eyed youthful enthusiasm that I sometimes feel for five minutes in the morning.

The day after class, I remembered how we kept our pens moving for fifteen minutes and how we then read aloud our creations. How we had religiously adhered to the no-comment rule. The critical remarks I typically award my own work were negligible. Savoring these positive memories, I decided it would be fun to reminisce about my thirties, so I ransacked the storeroom searching for 1975 journals. I found nothing.

So I closed my eyes and tried to remember. When thirty, I gave birth to my third son.  We lived in a house that was so perfect I was certain I never wanted to move. I could see the rainbow mural in the breezeway when looking out the nursery window! At that point in my life, I had been certain that if I could just be out in the world doing good works, my life would be rich and satisfying. I was a Welcome Wagon Hostess for parents of newborns and eventually was elected club president. I then flashed on how I had organized a study group for young mothers with children at our church.

An image of the minister’s wife’s dizzyingly high-soles platform shoes comes to me and I remember feeling similarly dizzy listening to the highfalutin’ feminist theories she espoused. These ideas were puzzle pieces that didn’t yet have a place in my life but I knew that I agreed with her. But I was intimidated by her certainty. Were women really as capable as men? Could women and men actually be friends? I remember going to a coffee shop in another town with her husband the minister and hearing later he was having an affair with one of my friends.

Sitting in the rocking chair looking out at the rainbow, cradling my newborn son in one arm and Carl Rogers’ book, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy in the other, I yearned to know more about becoming the person Rogers described. It would be years before I had “become” enough to challenge the beliefs I had been so certain of at that time. Reader, if you have thirty years of adult life to spare, take a look back at your beliefs then. What do you find?

IMAGE: A peaceful rainy day captured from the back deck.