Volume 3: What's My Age, Again?

It’s 2003. I’m walking down the hallways of my high school (Go Wildcats!) listening to “What’s My Age Again” by blink-182 on an MP3 player. Life is good.

It’s 2023. I’m sitting in my home office listening to “What’s My Age Again” by blink-182 on Spotify. Life is good.?

But it’s definitely not what I thought it would be.?

I’ll blame pop culture. Listening to John Mayer sing “Must be a quarter-life crisis” in Why Georgia. Reading Henry and Clare’s love story in “The Time Traveler’s Wife”. Watching Jenna Rink AKA Jennifer Garner go from 13 to 30. Those people, now those were the adults.?

Yet I’ve reached a point in my life where I am now older than all of them: John Mayer was 23 when he wrote Room For Squares. Henry was 28 and Clare was 20 when they met in the novel. And my beloved Jenna Rink AKA Jennifer Garner was, of course, 30.?

It was my birthday a few weeks ago: but would anyone actually like me when I’m 33??

In my childhood and adolescent fantasies of what I thought being an adult would mean, by the time I hit my 30’s I thought I’d have the following:?

• A husband
• 2.5 kids
• A house in Burnaby
• Still be able to fit into my jeans from high school
• A pie always perched perfectly on the windowsill
• Some kind of vague source of income

What I actually have:

• A husband
• An orange tabby cat
• A one-bedroom + den condo in Port Moody
• Generalized Anxiety Disorder
• Raspberry Cheesecake brownies from Purebread on the kitchen counter
• A career?

So yeah… other than the husband part (you’re a gem, Edward), things didn’t go quite according to plan. Truth be told, I was convinced for so many years that I was going to become a stay-at-home mom that I didn’t put much stock into my own career until about five or six years ago. And the things I did put stock into prior to 2017 always had these fictitious little children in the back of my mind: children who needed to be picked up from their hypothetical soccer games or dropped off to their imaginary birthday tea parties, and always, definitely, needed to be cleaned up after.

Let me say this though: I love children. I have the funniest five year old niece who’s amazing at cartwheels, two adorable nieces in Dublin and a six month old godson in contention for the “Cutest Baby Cheeks in Surrey” Award. I admire mothers of all kinds and advocate for their right to choose the best lives for themselves and their families, whether that be “staying at home”, working-full-time or part-time and so on. And for those that may not know, I was even a licensed Early Childhood Educator for over seven years before I started my career in real estate.?

I did not go from a longtime dream of wanting kids to choosing a child-free life overnight. I changed my mind over the course of years of introspection, growth and an examination of what I truly wanted out of my life.

And to say that the decision on whether or not to have kids impacted, and will continue to impact, my career would be a disservice to the struggles that many women face and the choices they have to make every day in their professional lives.

For anyone interested in understanding how to support women in the workplace, I highly recommend reading “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” by Caroline Criado Perez. If you hear me disparaging about the gender inequity in municipal snow removal processes for instance, it’s because of her.

My taste in music might not have changed much over the past 20 years, as I still have Death Cab for Cutie, John Mayer and blink-182 on heavy rotation. But it might be time to embrace aging for the beautiful, back aching, peaceful, rewarding process that it is. And that maybe it’s OK if not everyone likes me when I’m 33.