Shout-Out To All My High-School Friends Who Haven’t Gotten Pregnant Or Married Yet
I am twenty-five. There, I said it. I have been so for a handful of weeks, so I’m still getting the hang of things. Additionally, I’m still waiting for my copy of Being an Adult: A Detailed Manual of Responsibility, Looking Awesome, & Proper Bikini Waxes to arrive in the mail any minute now. (That work, of course, is a nonexistent piece of literature I made up for the purposes of this posting.)
The reason I am effectively outing my age to you is because I spent the majority of my teens hurrying to grown up and the majority of my early twenties trying to hang on to my stubborn youth. Finally, at the icy peak of my mid-twenties, saddled with student loans, the hippest slang, and a detailed memorization of which Happy Hour starts where, I’m hella ready to live in the moment.
A lot of my high-school friends are in the heyday of getting pregnant, or married, or dogs, or some combination of the three. And while I’m over-the-moon happy that they’re finding joyous fulfillment in this baby-married-dog life, I am in no way ready (or legally qualified) for this for three very specific reasons:
1. I don’t have a boyfriend/husband/babydaddy. You have to have a boyfriend/husband/babydaddy to get pregnant (according to MTV).
2. I don’t have a boyfriend/husband/babydaddy. You have to have a boyfriend/husband/babydaddy to get married (according to Pinterest).
3. I don’t have time to pick up dog poop. Also, I don’t have a yard.
Truth be told, I admire the way my peers handle the baby-married-dog situation: I only know one friend-of-a-friend-of-a-cousin’s-friend who ended up on Teen Mom. So, save a few minor “WTF For Real? No, Seriously?” cases, my homies have the whole “Maturity & Looking Awesome Taking Care Of Babies/Spouses/Dogs” thing down to a science. As for me, I’ve got other priorities.
Let me put it this way: My best gal pal and I are more excited about the latest technology, sporting event, or food/beer combination. Those are our babies: food babies—I’m in my second trimester, thanks for asking! For example, if she were to welcome home the latest Apple gadget, we would react as if she were welcoming home a fresh baby from the hospital. We would gather around the sparkly machine, wide-eyed and cooing things like:
“Oh, it has your sleek lines!”
“Cuuuute, it definitely has Steve Jobs’s lips!”
“Dang, that baby is fresh.”
“Hell yes, you should totally enter it in pageants!”
I will never tire of watching the baby-married-dog situation of my peers play out on Facebook; that I can promise you. Some of those chubby babies, dogs, and spouses are my day-makers (and Thinspiration)! At this point in my quarter-century of a life, it’s safer and more fulfilling for me to watch from a distance. I respect timely wedding RSVPs as much as the next wannabe bride, but I’m not ready to give up playing the field. Wassup, Tinder?! So while they’re keeping me in the loop on the swankiest new wedding venue or how their dog knows more words than their toddler, I’ll be dancing like a mega-dork in the mud at a music festival to my favorite band in the entire universe and letting you know how fan-flippin’-tastic my last meal was. Also, I still listen to New Boyz’s “Better With the Lights Off.” I feel like you should be legally obligated not to do that in order to procreate.
My questionable taste in Chris Brown-related music aside, I love being twenty-five-ish, and I’m hella happy being sans baby/husband/dog. I might, however, feel differently about this if I find myself in my fifties publicizing my lack of a baby-husband-dog, and if I do find myself there in another quarter-century, there’s always CATS—the animals, not the musical.