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I never really thought very much about life after the age of 30. I spent all of my adolescence waiting for the technicolour dreamscape of my 20s, and if I tried to picture a time beyond them, the screen would just go black. Like many young people with the privilege of inexperience, I figured the rest of my life would be a foregone conclusion.
At the time, television shows, books, films, and stories told and retold around the table on Christmas Day seemed to support this: by 30, you ought to have your life figured out. If you came of age in the early aughts or before, you learned that you had an expiration date, and the more candles you accumulated on your birthday cake, the staler you became.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
For as much as they’re revered and referenced now, the Sex and the City girls spent the show’s entire run trying to play catch-up to their better-settled peers. Charlotte began lying about her age at 36, and when Miranda was made a partner at her law firm, it was a consolation prize for being unmarried at 35. Bridget Jones was a cautionary tale. The cast of Cheers looked like their next milestone would be retirement, and in the first season of SeinfeldElaine was — get this — 27.
Let’s look closer.
By my paternal grandmother’s early 30s, she had two sons and at least three languages under her belt, and the life she had before she escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia was a distant memory. By the same age, my mother had three kids, two ex-husbands, a double-fronted terrace house in Paddington, and was on her second or third career. Weddings, careers, divorces, children, crises, all before any of these people reached the true mid-point of their lives.
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The big plans I had to follow suit were, in retrospect, adorable. I would meet my soulmate at university, and by age 25, we would have had a chic courthouse wedding and moved to Edinburgh. Two corgis — Susan, a bossy little ginger menace, and Treacle, the biggest idiot ever — would greet me each evening when I returned from work at my small but successful literary agency.
Somewhere in there, I’d fit in a master’s degree. Time would simply pass in a cloud of pastel idyll until … what? Menopause? The screen adaptation of my bestselling memoir? Death? It didn’t matter. That was a problem for future me. Thirty years sounded like a very long time.
Well, I’m turning 33 in just a moment, and one night this week, I watched Christopher Robin and sobbed into the tiramisu I was having for dinner. My corgi died nine months ago, and I haven’t been on a date in a year. Were we able to meet one another somewhere beyond linear time, what would my 30-something grandmother and I even have to talk about?
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