stock taking

The night I turned twenty-six, I ate dinner in the dining room at the boarding school where I was teaching, a bucolic—and very fancy—school tucked in the northwest corner of Connecticut. I had dinner that night as I did so many others that year, sitting at a round table with my colleagues, eating lukewarm mashed potatoes, trading witticisms and ironic banter. That year I nursed a horrible, stomach-aching crush on an unavailable history teacher and I worried about what it would be like when I moved to North Carolina to start graduate school in a few months. I remember that night because I remember rattling off a long diatribe about how everything happens when you’re 28. I went around the table and asked everyone what happened when they were 28.

I got married.
We had a baby.
I finished graduate school.
I got married.
We had a baby.
I bought a house.

See, I said, it all happens when you’re 28. But I knew that 28 would come and go for me. I knew that I wouldn’t get married at 28, finish graduate school at 28, have a baby at 28. And while I did technically buy a house when I was 28, I sold it when I was 30, so it doesn’t really count. That night when I turned 26, I realized that I was on a different schedule, an alternative timeline. I went back to my tiny dorm apartment and made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for the fourteen girls who lived on my hall and knocked on my door when they didn’t know what to do about Sara’s anorexia or Katie’s nasty boyfriend, or their own soccer coach, or that damned college essay. I ended my 26th with a stiff gin and tonic, earplugs, and a fat dog named Arlo taking up half the bed.

Tomorrow I turn 34. It’s an even number and even numbers work better for me. I no longer eat dinner with colleagues in a dining room—which, perversely, I often miss—but I still take stock of numbers and years. I’m 34.

I’m getting married.
I’d like to have a baby.
I finished graduate school last year.

Tomorrow I turn 34 and last night I baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for sixteen young ladies who ask me questions about post-structuralism and deconstruction, who look at me as if I know the answer. I’ll come home from work tonight, alone. I’ll go to gym and run like mad for exactly 28 minutes. I’ll do a hundred sit ups and stretch my 34-year old back. Maybe I’ll have that one beer in the back of my fridge. I’ll pat the place at the end of my bed where my two-years-gone hound used to sleep. I’ll think about what’s changed since I was 26. I’ll remember that history teacher who made my stomach ache and I’ll think about the history teacher that I’m soon to marry. I’m 34 now.