What's In An Age?

A portion of today's post is brought to you by the maker's of me: My Family.

I play the "age game" all the time. It feels organized to me and I always think that keeping my age in mind somehow makes it to where I will be more successful by checking things off of my "To-Do List" by a certain age. To a certain extent, it does, while other times it makes me feel horrible. For example:

My student loans and starting a retirement plan.

I wanted to get my loans paid off and some kind of retirement plan happening before the age of 30. BOOM. Done. They both happened this year {with me being 29}. But guess what? They are done. Those are both long-term things that needed attention and I feel great knowing that I set a goal for myself so that I could accomplish them and not have the hassle later on in life. Yay me!

The difficulty that I run into is that my age game doesn't stop there. I do it to a lot of other things.

In college I felt like I needed to ensure that I had a steady relationship by a certain age. Crazy, but a true story (I would love to write a letter to college women discouraging them for this kind of thinking). During my first marriage I wanted to be 27 to first start having kids...the irony being that I was 27 when we were divorced. And even now, even with me turning 30 soon I feel this all-consuming need to have certain things squared away because of my age.

It's maddening.

The worst is that I KNOW it's maddening, but there are so many other variables of my life that I can't control that attempting to get the checklist of my life done at certain times seems like a way to balance that out. Am I sick? {that question actually made me laugh a little}.

Does anyone else feel this way? And more importantly, has it ever worked out for you? That's what I'm most curious about. 

I'm curious to know if your job aspirations hinged on what age you wanted to accomplish them by, or if you are a few years past, say, wanting to start a family. What do you do to help ease that concern?

On one hand the people that I know still have overwhelming school debt and on the other I watch them post adorable baby pictures of their newborns. Sure, I feel a little irked. I'm like anybody else, I want the things I want when I want them. What's so wrong with wanting a family a little early AND not drowning in debt? But then I remember that I'm not rich and I have to work hard to take care of one thing to then successfully move on to the other.

My train of thought for this post started because of my family's request for grandkids. Sore subject. Already being older than what I would have preferred didn't really bother me until recently. 

More specifically, because out of both sides of the family my parents are the only ones without grandkids, and I happen to be one of the oldest female cousins and I am the only one to not have given birth. So, the guilt trip of "I bought out the Dr. Suess books from when Border's Book Store went out of business and I would like to have someone to read them to before I die," occurred recently.

Sure. I will get right on that.

It also doesn't help that the person with whom I would create a family with lives a plane ride away and it's always uncertain as to when we would get to see one another. And at that point, I would become a single parent for the next couple of years.

Circling around to my original point: when I make age-related goals sometimes they are a tremendous success! And other times....not so much.

I need a foam-rubber stress ball. Christmas gift anyone?