Matthew is 38 with the almost leathery-type facial skin that shows a man has lived, partied, perhaps to an extreme in both areas. He's also 38 years a bachelor, rich and unashamed. Matt reminds me of my ex-boyfriend, the one with the old looking face aged by too much smoking. The one who died of cancer. Except Matt's wealthy, intelligent, well-traveled and owns a boat. Mike was just an artist who drank too much. But he made me laugh.
Matt makes me feel young. He makes me feel 29. I feel immature and inexperienced around him. Our academic specialties are in different disciplines so I don't have much to contribute to any conversation and there's no sense in going into what interests me. So I feel little like a kid pretending to be a grown-up, timidly side-stepping to get out of his shadow.
The man I actually like is just my age. I spoke to him on the phone the other day to wish him a happy 30th birthday. While he'd too been dreading it, he was pretty pleased that evening because a 21 year old girl had hit on him. "Bravo," I thought and looked instinctively down as I often do when I'm embarrassed or disappointed even though I was on the phone and he wouldn't have been able to read the insecurity in my eyes as they lowered to my lap. I noticed my hands that for the first time are starting to show evidence of age. My veins stick out a little more than they used to and as I stare at them, I can see my great-grandmother's blue veins with pale skin barely clinging to them, and then my mother's hands, more my color but with scattered age spots and saggy skin, and then my own again with every pore showing as pores tend to do before the lines between them connect to form wrinkles above the veins just starting to bulge. They are the hands of a 30 year old woman and I I realize I kind of like them.
I too feel a slight satisfaction when a 19-year-old boy does a double take as I walk by. But I don't want to date one.
A co-worker also turned 30 this month. Last weekend I went to her party. An afternoon gig, there were friends from her hometown in Sheridan, TX there with their families. Girls with babies and pictures of themselves in wedding dresses littered the picnic tables. They are young though, significantly younger than we are, with smooth skin and not a wrinkle to be found. No sign of obscene laughter or insane tears crept out of their round eyes for there were no lines giving testimony to that. Their cheeks still bulged a little without the definition of jaw and mouth that often develops for women in their later twenties and thirties. For the first time, I saw women cradling babies and doting on toddlers and knew for certain that i was not one of them. I turned from them to an old friend from seminary, not married and also without children, a few years older than me. I studied the females before me. Although they were all "baby-bearing age," their faces, their skin and eyes and mouths marked the differences in their generations. And I knew which one I belonged in.
And I liked it. I looked at my friend and she was beautiful. The young girls' smooth untarnished faces were enviable no doubt, but as I looked at my fellow thirty-something, I prayed to look just like them: like life could be evidenced not by a baby in the arms or a wedding dress on a photo, but simply by the look on my face, the contour of my body. The gentle but strong eyes, the freckled, colored skin, the strong bones and muscles and hips whose due reverence comes only from time. Who knew? Who knew I would treasure growing "old?"
I'm an adult, I realized. And today I realized I want to be with a man who wants to be with an adult. A woman. Not a teenager playing dress-up, not a twenty-something seeking more experience than life is willing to give her yet. I don't want to play with older men whose lives make me feel little and small, older men who I help to feel young. Neither do I want to play with younger men who stroke my ego and seduce my pride. I want to be with someone who sees me for me. Who sees the eye crinkles and the thick-pored hands and the strong shoulders and the sometimes all too bountiful hips and the tummy that could stand to be tucked and loves it. Loves it all. Loves me.
Because I love me. And I'm about to turn 30. And while I once thought that age to be old and depressing, I now find it invigorating, and appealing. Downright gorgeous if you will. And maybe someday someone will say the same thing about me.
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