Everyone I Know is Getting Married or Pregnant

         With my 25th birthday right around the corner, it seems more and more lately that my the peers slightly older than me (and even my age and younger!) are getting married or pregnant.

          This was even truer for my mom's generation, where most people got married in their early to mid-twenties and were popping out kids by the time they were my age. My madre got married at 22 and had me a month or so shy of her 25th birthday.

           (Can we stop and pause for a second to consider that if I WERE my mother I'd already have a newborn!? Like holy mother of sweet baby beluga WHALES is that scary! Not that I can't handle kids. I can. But knowing what a responsibility they are and how much of a LIFE SUCK they are, I fully want to live my life before devoting myself to parental pursuits. Enough said.)

           Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

          Ok, ok, I get it, I'm young. And believe me, I don't want to rush these things: the last thing I ever want to aim for is to marry the wrong one. I'm a firm believer that it is BY FAR better to have none than to have the wrong one. I am not one of those women who, out of fear of being alone, is going to leap into the arms of Mr. Almost-Right-Could-be-Right-if-it-Weren't-for-TOTALLY-NOT-RIGHT for me. Not my style. I'm not aiming for a divorce or even to put any potential children through a divorce. I've already been through one (my parent's), thank you, and that's enough for me!

          That said, twenty five can be (is?) a scary age for a young woman.

          Half-way through the twenties, dammit. Where the hell did twenty to twenty-four go?

          It's again, not that I want to rush things. It's more of the imponderable sense of the potential of the next five years. Do I feel like an adult at 25 like I thought I would when I was 18? Not really. I had this picture of myself at 25 when I graduated from high school: fresh out of law school, ready to start a career, in a long term relationship with someone (maybe engaged? or soon to be?), happy as a clam, maybe living in San Francisco.

           REALITY CHECK:

           1. Never went to law school. Finishing a Masters in French lit.
           2. Sorta starting a career in fields I never knew existed or careers I don't even know if I want.
           3. Not seeing any one, just had my heart trampled on by a charming French southerner. NO WHERE NEAR GETTING ENGAGED.
          4. Happy? Yes. As a clam? No. Wading through the fading catastrophe of a quarter life crisis.

           Maybe this would be an easier pill to swallow if all those friends weren't getting married or married or pregnant. My own two college roommates are now married! One of them at the age 22 and the other at the age of 25 this past summer.

            Again, this is not a race. I do not have a biological clock staring me down violently. But it is rather hard to see the people around me and not start existentially questioning myself. And as my Best-Friend-Roomate from Berkeley would put it, ever so wisely, as she is, ¨You don't get to chose when you meet the right person.¨

             Really, you don't. You only get the choice of what happens when you do meet them. And to be fair, I have plenty of friends in their thirties who are not married and do not have kids. Thank modernity and the economy for a very extended period of ¨adolescence¨ and a whole new biological-clock-defying time line for all that is getting married and having a family with someone. These friends help me at least see that I am normal being 25 and neither married nor preggers. Thank GOODNESS.

            For now, I'm going to do down some mojitos on my birthday, thank my lucky stars I am not YET a parent, and that I haven't married the wrong person.

            Everyone else is getting married or pregnant.

             YOLO.