Aging Gracefully: 29 and Not So divine

Since turning 29 on August 6th, I’ve contemplated the idea of aging and how the avoidance of aging has literally taken the world by storm. Particularly, the female population.

I get it though, we don’t want to get older and we certainly don’t want to look older. I suppose I am not scared of appearing older but I am afraid of the pressures and expectations that come with age. With youth you get a certain amount of “Free passes” and people are willing to shrug off the most ridiculous of your indiscretions due to “youth” and “immaturity”. However once you reach that “Certain Age” all bets are off.

I’d like to discuss that “certain age” when things begin to change, expectations begin to heighten and crow’s feet creep up and start to call the corners of your mouth “home”.

The following areas of your life change dramatically ( and annoyingly)as you round the corner of “30” and I would like to shed some light on what to expect while “aging”


1. Career – you are supposed to “be somebody” by now right?

The only other time that your career matters more than when you first graduate from college and are starting your professional journey would be when you are about to hit age 30. When we are young we are filled with delusions of grandeur and believe that age 30 is this magical and mystical age where everything in our life will come neatly together and all loose ends will simply tie themselves. I think that by the time we hit age 25 is when we start to shift our eyes and realize that maybe age 30 isn’t the end-all be-all we believed it to be. In our late 20’s, no other part of our lives defines us more thoroughly than our profession or career choice. When you date, when you speak with family or when you do nearly anything the first question a person will ask you is “what do you do for a living?” If you have a sketchy answer for that question you can basically prepare yourself for a decade (at least) of scrutiny and questions like “so what precisely do you mean by outside sales?” It’s a harsh world out there for our generation because of the horrible economy and the unemployment crisis. Gone are the days when a bachelor’s degree and a smile was enough to get you through the door of a major corporation and comfortably on your way up the corporate ladder. In this day and age, all a Bachelor’s Degree will promise you is one sweet paper weight. The worst thing about having your career totally define you is when things didn’t go quite “how you planned” at some point during your 20’s causing your life plan to completely derail you are in for some turbulence. Anyone who doesn’t understand what I am talking about, kindly close out of this blog and move about with your life. We’ve all had roadblocks get in the way of our professional success which could be being laid off, a sick relative, dropping out of school, having a baby…and the list goes on and on. However, no one , and I mean no one, really gives a flying crud about those alleged “roadblocks” when they hear you are age 30 and ask you what you do for a living and you say “ oh, a little bit of this and a little bit of that” or “ how much do you know about screen-printing?”. No matter which way you try to spin this, it will not fly. Trust me, I have been there, boy have I been there. The bottom line is that by the time you are 30, you are supposed to be established in some legitimate line of work with a fair amount of education and experience under your belt. No other situation is considered acceptable at this point by your family and peers. Period. With the only exception being if you are stay at home mom, but we will get to that can of worms a bit later.

2. Keeping up with the Jones’- you still live in an apt? Oh...well that’s cute.

Its happened to the best of us. We wake up one day, feeling light on our feet, refreshed, healthy and confident about our day. We have a productive day at work, we are having a great hair day and we even meet a new guy in the elevator. At happy hour that evening, is when things, well it’s when things take a turn for the worst. At happy hour, lurk our friends and colleagues with a plethora of stories to tell about their family, career and kids. Nothing to knock you squarely off your high horse like a 30 year old guy sitting with his 23 year old fiancée wearing her size 2 pants and flashing her 2 carat rock. Suddenly your good hair day does not seem like such a big deal. Your whole day of feeling fresh, cute and clean goes muddling down the proverbial drain. What a hot mess right? Let me clarify my point. When we get closer to 30, the urge to compare our lives to our peers grows exponentially and there is nothing we can do about that. Even the most kind and considerate person can’t turn a blind eye when a friend gets a new house or moves on to a new stage in life. We don’t always speak on It and we don’t always act on it but the emotions and feelings are consistently there. And to add insult to injury, once you hit this age you must pretend to be happy for these other people no matter how you really feel. If you don’t care, or if you makes you jealous or unhappy you pretty much have to put on a happy face and fight through it. And you can only imagine the havoc that reeks on your mental condition. So on a night where you may be desiring to feel sorry for yourself and wanting to sit on your kitchen floor, eat pizza and drink wine you have to spruce up and go to another bachelorette party, baby shower or wedding reception. You are expected to be there, look good, bring a gift and by golly, be damn well excited about it. Ah, welcome to our 30s.

3. Crunch Time- your figure looks great….for an older woman…


It’s hard to meet a woman of late 20s or early 30s who isn’t working on her figure or thinking about working on her figure, or just downright obsessed with her figure. In your 20s it’s hard enough to accept the realization that you can’t just eat everything, drink all night and never work out, but when you get to age 30 you have to consider new factors, such as gravity. Most of us unfortunately do get larger as we get older and our body shapes just tend to be come, well, rather unfortunate. Clothes don’t fit the same, shoes hurt your feet when they didn’t use to and your hair just doesn’t ever seem to have the same bounce and shine it once did. It’s like every part of you is staging a mutiny. Even the genetically thin out of our group don’t feel up to par like they once did. Everything you eat seems to stick, and casual exercise no longer works the way it once did. You have to face reality and revamp your entire fitness routine and diet, and this is just to break even. Don’t even think about trying to lose weight unless you are mentally and physically prepared to wage a full scale war against genetics and Mother Nature. It’s an uphill battle that even the most ambitious among us often lose. To be in the early 20s is to be lithe and taut with no worries about calories and carbs and cardio! We start to edge into our mid20s and late 20s and the boobs sit lower, the upper arm flaps in the wind and the butt starts a “downward facing dog” trend. The problem comes in because when you are 28, 29 or 30 you are technically still very young on a general scale so you are still held to the same standard of beauty and fitness as someone who is 21, 22 or 23. You can see how this can be unfair. Your metabolism is not the same as age 21, nor is the quality of your skin or hair. You just generally have more problems as you get older unless you are a celebrity like Halle Berry, who has millions of dollars to spend on NASA sleep tanks which restore your skin and muscles and Human growth hormone shots that literally make you wake up as an infant. Average women just don’t have those “perks” in life. My point is that as we get to age 30 and up, you can be prepared to start watching your diet and spending major time in the gym if you care to avoid wearing the standard mom jeans (* do not have to actually be a mom to wear mom jeans) and flannel pull overs.

4. Getting older has a ring to it- Dating and Marriage

Probably one of the largest causes of stress and turmoil for us at late 20s and early 30s Is the development of a solid relationship which ultimately leads to a marriage situation. This is another issue which I believe is very much unique to our generation. In the “old days”, a woman met a man in college and immediately married and had a child. This all would happen rather quickly. These days its common for a woman to date loosely in college, focus on her career only after graduation and then contemplate settling down around age 25. The ultimate problem with this frame of thought is that by the time you care to settle down all the “good ones” are allegedly “gone”. If you are pretty and have a good career with at least a fair personality people will wonder what is “wrong” with you if you haven’t settled down by age 30, even If its actually by your own choice. I think dating gets harder and more frustrating the older we get because we are more set in our ways and far less tolerant of certain quirks and behavioral issues. When we are in our teens and 20s, dating is more fun and carefree because we “ don’t know what we want” and our still learning who we are. When you are 27 or so, you are pretty well aware of who you are and are far pickier in regards to who you will accept as a partner. Normally when you are looking at men who are around age 30 they will have kids, maybe have been married before and have a whole boatload of mental problems or hang ups that they have accumulated over the last three decades that you now have to contend with. It’s much more difficult to mold and shape a man when he is firmly set in his beliefs and established some really bad habits. So not only do you have to duck and dive the “stigma” of being single at age 30, you have to face your parents who may be eyeing you skeptically, your friends marrying up and popping out kids, but now you’ve got to face a water thin population of men your age and hope you can find the one who isn’t a convicted felon. Dating at an older age is a circus and if it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be so many damn reality shows about it.


5. Family Matters- What do you mean you don’t have kids yet?

Ah, Motherhood. The holy grail of our 30s. Right? Hmm, perhaps not. If society says you are supposed to go to college at age 18, and marry at 23, then it sure as heck dictates that you damn well better have a baby (or two) by age 30. Preferably one boy and one girl. Blond hair and blue eyes ( and yes this applies even if you are black, so you better figure out a way to make it happen). Society can be a bit of beast, if I may say so myself. This situation hits home whether you are in a relationship or not, the desire for a woman to have a child grows stronger with age. This is one I cannot deny. So not only do you feel internal pressure ( you know from your eggs) but also external pressure from family ,friends and the media. Ugh. What a nightmare. Even if you don’t want a kid or are happily married with no desire for some blood sucking rug rat to mess up your expensive accent walls and bleed your bank account dry. The expectation is there and it remains and lingers like a monkey on your back. I’ve known mothers to even give a look of pity to their non-mother friends for no reason at all other than the fact that the “ poor soul” doesn’t know the “joy” of motherhood. This is complete nonsense, of course, but you cant tell any mothers that! If you truly want kids and just don’t or can't have them, that’s bad enough, but then when you compound this problem with the “holier than thou” attitude of all the mothers around you, you have a real situation on your hands. As if reaching into your 401K account to afford the gifts for all the baby showers and “presentation luncheons" isn’t taxing enough, you have to shove down forkful after forkful of shame at the hands of lactating and pretentious mothers and even worse “ mothers-to-be”. I have never met a mother who didn’t believe that you don’t know anything about “life” until you’ve bore a child. It’s a completely illogical notion yet they all stand by it with centrifugal force. I hate to say this, but its almost more acceptable to be an age 30 mother of two on welfare than it is a female CEO of a major corporation with no husband and no kids..... “ well I know she has a good job but good God I’ve heard she’s only got an egg or two left…my Lord, if she isn’t careful….”…...


As if aging due to natural causes wasn’t a strain enough on your confidence, we can see that there are a number of external (i.e. unnatural) issues that may cause one’s crow’s feet to pluralize with the quickness. Ok so you’re 30, you’ve got to be smart as a whip, accomplished as a CEO, thin as a reed, energetic as a battery, friendly and social as a bee, upwardly mobile, excessively talented, a great cook, a perfect wife, a prim housekeeper, churchgoing, and most importantly, a loving and obsessively doting mother of no less than 100 kids. See, not so horrible right? Eek! Help! I don’t know about you guys but I am dead tired and the older I get the more exhausted I get. Heck, I may even have developed carpal tunnel just typing this blog.