30

Today's the day.  I'm 30.  Yuck.  My whole life I've been so excited for my birthday.  The surprises, the presents, the cake, the day all about ME!  I love my birthday.  This year...it's been kind of a kick in the pants.  I did not see it coming, the whole melancholy on my birthday thing, but it turns out big mile stone birthdays are kinda hard.

When I was younger I thought that the year that your age started with a 3 instead of a 2 meant you were suddenly old, unrelatable somehow, out of the realm of "cool twenties" and now I'm an older, married thirty something.  I've spent a few days pondering my 30 years.

I had a long dream a couple of nights ago about all of my past passions.  It was like a long flashback of all my dreams and goals of yesteryear.  I dreamed about my presentation on dyslexia in my education class in college.  I asked to give it because dyslexia wasn't being covered and I thought my fellow future teachers needed to know about it!  I researched it, planned a really cool interactive presentation.  I got that feeling where you knew that somehow this passion, this purpose was going to be a part of your life.  I researched dyslexia teacher training programs.  I talked to counselors in different schools asking, if I got myself trained would they let me test and teach and help kids with dyslexia?  I got so excited about the possibility of helping.  Helping kids who were getting lost, see how smart they are.  How important and wonderful they are regardless of being dyslexic.

Then I dreamed about seeing my first West End production, "Ragtime".  Walking back to our flat from the tube stop and talking with my friend.  Analyzing the scenery, the directing, the actor's choices.  What would we have done differently?  What worked and made the theme more powerful?  I remember the ache I felt, sitting in the audience.  I still feel it when I see shows.  The ache of wanting to be on the stage.  Wanting to be the one to hit those notes, wear those costumes, say those words, make other people feel the story of that character.

Then I dreamed about seeing the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.  Walking through the intricate arches, and seeing the Patio de Los Leones for the first time.  There was a story I read years before in a beginning Spanish class, a legend about what happened in that room.  I remember the tingling sense of history, of magic, being in the very room that I had pictured for years thinking about that story.  Walking through the halls of the palace feeling the weight of centuries of people who walked those tiled halls before me and imagining all of the stories that happened there that I had never read about.

I dreamed of the afternoons spent on the couch with my roommate pouring over Spanish magazines, reading them aloud to try to improve our flow and accents.  Looking up every word we didn't know so we could improve our vocabulary.  Remembering the drive that I had to conquer and figure out this language that I loved so much.

Then somehow my dream led me to my huge, windowless classroom at American Fork Junior High, always packed with at least 40 students.  To the faces of the students I wanted so badly to teach and nurture and shape.  To the one face who had so much drama in her life, that she had no room for me to just teach her drama.  To the feeling of loss I felt as I walked out of that building for the last time.  Knowing that it would be years, if I ever taught again and feeling that that year was in many ways not what I wanted it to be.  Knowing that if I just had one more year, I could have been the teacher I longed to be.

I woke up kind of bummed.  Longing for those passions.  Those dreams and weighty moments.  Moments where I just knew, I felt that where I was, what I was doing would shape my future life.  And here I am.  Thirty.  And the life I live now doesn't have enough space in it for the passions I used to have.  Don't get me wrong.  I LOVE my life.  I wouldn't trade my sweetheart, my boys, my house, my job as a mommy for anything in the world.  But you know what?  We stay at home moms have a hard time on big mile stones like today because, if we're incredibly lucky, like I am, when we look back at our lives we see all the other passions before we had our littles.  And part of being a mom means letting those go.  For a while.  For a lot of years, while we do our greatest, our most important work.  I love my children.  I love being their mother.  Sometimes it's hard to realize how much of me I've lost (Spanish language skills anyone?), or put aside for a while.

I talked to my little brother today.  And he didn't see me holding back the tears while I was talking to him over the phone.  But when I told him that I was having a sort of melancholy birthday he said, "But Kim, all those years and experiences made you who you are.  They weren't for nothing.  It's okay that you're thirty because you've earned thirty."  So there it is.  My thirty year old ponderments.  All of my amazing experiences in my life have shaped me.  My great education, my travel, my passions, my dreams, they're still a part of me.  I am who I am because of those experiences and those 30 years and I'm a better woman, wife, and mother for them.  Maybe some day I'll see the Alhambra again and maybe I'll even remember how to speak a bit of Spanish.  Maybe some day I'll star in something small on stage, but maybe not.  Maybe some day I'll teach again.  Help students who are lost.  Who need someone to remind them how great, how smart, how important they are.  But for now, I'm pretty busy doing what I do.   And I am grateful for my 30 years.