F*ck milestones
All adventurous women do
My son turns three this week and I have been mildly impressed with myself that I’ve not obsessed over his milestones too much. I mean, sure, you want your kid to keep up with their peers but I was never too concerned if he walked a little late or it took him a while to get the hang of the alphabet. All children develop at different rates.
It’s a shame, then, that I didn’t hold this same energy for my own milestones. And I’m not talking about when I learned how to chew solids, but rather the big life milestones: house, marriage, baby. I fell behind my peers on all of these things and gave myself an incredibly hard time about it. In short, I felt like a massive loser. And I felt a lot of shame. Why did it seem so easy for some people?
35 is generally the age by which women are expected to ‘have it all’. If we look at the stats, in the UK the average age for women to have their first baby is 29, to get married is 31, and to buy a property is 33. I turned 35 seven years ago, marking the occasion at yet another friend’s wedding that I was attending solo. I had no partner, no children and no home of my own. I hadn’t hit one milestone. Now 42 - and sometimes no one is as surprised as I am at this - I have all of those things. This is how I got there, what I wished I’d done differently or hadn’t worried about, and what I’ve learned along the way.
So, where should we start with my failure at milestones?