I turn 32 this weekend.
For most, this is probably an uneventful age. 30 is big, maybe 35, certainly 40. But 32? It’s still your early 30s, you’ve adjusted to being in your 30s, no major milestones.
For me, it’s a little different, for 2 reasons:
1) My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer at 32. That’s actually the minor thing, believe it or not – it’s not like I feel like a ticking time bomb or anything. I get scans of 2 varieties twice a year, do my preventive due-diligence, etc etc. It just gives me a little more perspective than I had at 13.
2) My great-grandmother got married – for the first time, to a divorced man 12 years her senior with a daughter not much younger than her – at 32. In 1928. (Maybe 1927 – unclear on this particular point…). And then went on to have 5 children. But that’s also perspective.
Society – and especially society of the Southern Christian Subculture variety – would have me believe that as a 32 year-old single woman, I am becoming an old maid. That I am past my prime and have failed to achieve the crowning glory of womanhood: being a wife and a mother. A divorced man on a coffee date recently asked me why I’ve never been married. I was dumbfounded. Seriously? What kind of question is that? (there was no second date)
And sometimes I fall into these cultural traps. Friends get engaged, get married, have babies, have birthday parties for their 5 year-old, and I start to think that they’re right. I’m getting old. There are no decent men left. I really have been too busy for a relationship. I have put my career first. That I am running out of time.
And then I remember the women in my family. I remember my legacy.
Let me introduce you to Gladys Roberts, my great-grandmother:
My aunt (for whom I am named), is the spitting image of my grandmother, who is the spitting image of her mother… Gladys. (and depending on the day and circumstance, that image sometimes includes the rifle 
)
She’s a little feisty. You may start any blaming for my feistiness with her. She’s pretty young here, but from what my mother has gleaned from my grandmother and my great aunts, her father – a Welsh immigrant – died when she was a young teenager. She and her siblings worked hard to support the entire family. She apparently did not always appreciate that her hard-earned money had to be used to pay for her sister’s children’s shoes.
But what’s clear to me in the pictures I have is that she loved life, and she LIVED life. She and her girlfriends traveled together – there are pictures from Yellowstone and climbing trees in the woods and goofing off in the snow. This was not a woman sitting around sewing things for her hope chest awaiting a proposal.
That’s Gladys on the wheelbarrow, we think being pushed by one of her sisters.
I love this one, possibly because of how much it reminds me of the scene in The Sound of Music when they all fall out of the boat (this was long before The Sound of Music ever existed… predates WWII altogether!)
And when my great-grandfather proposed – a scandal, I suppose, given their age difference and her old-maid status and his divorcee-with-child status – she ran away to Europe for a year. And then came back to marry him. And have 5 daughters.
This is the best picture of all 5 girls I’ve seen – Great-Grammy must be close to 40 in this picture. And doesn’t she look AMAZING?!
And then there’s Jane, my grandmother – who got married at the ripe old age of 25 (which is, in fact, old, when you’ve dated your husband since you were 18 and it’s 1955). She and her sisters were quite obviously raised in the manner of their mother, judging by their pictures – mostly outside, always a bow askew or a skirt over the head while hanging upside down. There are a few tea parties, but the dolls tend to be hanging off the chairs secured only by a hand gripping their hair.
Pretty sure my grandmother is the one with the hanging doll…
My grandmother tells me that when they were teenagers (all 4 of them – their oldest sister, Joan, died of meningitis at the age of 7. Vaccines are your friend, folks!), their father took them into the garage to learn how to change a tire. These were not girls who grew up with orders to stay inside and learn how to embroider….
My grandmother and her sisters grew up in what was once “the country”, but now is one of the busiest roads in my hometown!
And then we have my mother, who at my very age, battled breast cancer, won, and 5 years later married my awesome stepdad. My mother who still asks, “Why shouldn’t we be able to do that?” when faced with a wide variety of challenges (she recently compared trimming the wood to replace a doorjamb to knowing how to cut construction paper for a preschool art project. Obviously.).
My parents’ wedding in 1997.
So. 32. Bring it on.
Quote for the day:
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or
an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?”
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods