Circular.

Today I had a dark and twisty kind of day, as pregnancy and engagement news filed in from various corners of friends and acquaintances. I'll be the first to tell you that I do not want to be married right now, nor pregnant, nor would I like to be responsible for a fish, let alone a child. I'm in law school. I don't have a life, and I admire those who have children, work full-time, and then come to school at night. (I met one woman the other day who does exactly this and I just wanted to give her a hug and offer to carry her backpack around for her - she must be exhausted.) I have no desire to be responsible for anyone other than myself at the moment.

But that doesn't mean that I won't occasionally look at where I am in life and wonder at how different it is than what I had, at various times, hoped and dreamed it would be. I'm not married, I don't live in Brookline in the good school district, I'm not a year away from having my first child, and I don't work in book publishing (nor am I in Cantorial School.) But at one point in my life, that was exactly my end goal. I told myself I wanted to start having children by age 30 because my mother hadn't started until 34 and she had always seemed so old compared to the other mothers. (In some cases that was true, as one friend's mother was 14 years younger than mine. In other cases my mother just appeared to be so much older than everyone else because that's just the way she is. I have to imagine that as a child, in some respects, she must have been 16 going on 60.) In reality, I'll turn 30 three months before I graduate next year, and certainly beginning a career is the exact wrong time in which to begin planning a family.

Aren't I allowed to mourn this in some respect? I don't live in the burbs (nor do I want to) and I don't drive a car (ditto) but aren't I allowed to mourn the person who I was who wanted those things at the time she thought would be just perfect for her? I'm not necessarily sad that I don't have those things, but maybe more sad that the ideas I had for myself then were so short-sighted.

I would have never imagined myself going to law school. I'm sad for the version of me who existed then who never believed in herself enough to imagine something as big as that.