My thirtieth birthday is almost here! If you would have asked me several years ago how I felt about such a milestone being on the horizon, I may have hid my panic under a smile and a joke about trying to stay young. Ask me today, and I’ll tell you this:
Looking back on the past three decades, I’ve realized that the single factor that has defined me at each stage has been my confidence.
Throughout the years, it has been an ebb and flow of knowing my place, owning who I am, and walking in the assurance that I am worthy and able. My passions, values, interests, and core have stayed similar (though they have experienced seasons of growth and change), but the gusto behind them has had its moments of shining and hiding.
My first decade: ten. I was a unique kid, purposefully choosing to do things because they were different. I was comfortable with who I was and happy to bee bop along doing my own thing. Weird lunchbox: yep. Different music: sure. A care in the world about what people thought: nope. At ten, I was chatty, silly, and not afraid to speak my mind. Ten year old me was ready for just about anything that could have come her way. Marching to my own beat never gave me pause; speaking to other kids or adults was a non issue; and standing up for what I believed was easy.
Somewhere between ten and twenty, decade two, my confidence waned, and I grew shy. While I still proudly operated a little differently than those around me, my insides screamed “Should you be here?” “You’re not like them.” A group of people was enough to make me clam up and wish I just would have stayed home. It’s not like I had these moments of feeling intentionally unwelcome; I just let small seeds of doubt chip away at the person I knew I was made to be. As a junior in college, the world seemed scary and the potential future post degree seemed daunting.
At twenty, I wasn’t totally lacking a backbone, but I certainly wasn’t brave enough to speak my mind. I had opinions, sure, but I didn’t always feel qualified or worthy of holding my own in a conversation. Secretly, I loved thinking differently than those around me; in my head, I was proud of me. Those feelings of pride that I appreciated about myself never seeped their way into my interactions with people, and the true me was not always represented.
Decade three: Thirty has come with a comfortability that I mostly attribute to motherhood, and though hindsight is 20/20, I so wish I could go back to the younger me and tell her what I know now. I cannot even tell you how freeing it is to walk around in my own skin, proudly owning this version of myself. Having Sully and the situations that arise from being his mom solidified what I did and did not believe in before him, gave me chances to grow by testing my social, emotional, and physical endurance, and skyrocketed my confidence to where I can walk around with assurance in who I am. In just one short year, life has thrown me opportunity after opportunity to either rise up or back down, and without a single thought against it, rising up is what I did. Why? Because motherhood prunes you, helps you shed selfishness or doubt that may get in the way of your child’s best interests.
Standing up for my son’s needs, both physical and emotional, gave me firm footing to know Whom I was standing on. Parenting is hard; parenting in a world where EVERYONE has an opinion on what I should or should not do in regards to our son is very hard. But God! He is our firm foundation, and with him as my base, I can stand tall, look whomever square in the eye, and parent my Sully with the confidence that I was made to be his mom.
Through it all, at the end of the day, I know this: If I love Sully just the way he is, and God loves Sully even more than I do, God must love me just the same. I cannot tell my son about my God’s love if I don’t live loved as well. Knowing that He has me no matter what the world says adds a spring to my step, forces me to lift my eyes up and off the sidewalk, and makes it a little easier to walk through life feeling worthy.
I’ve circled back to that ten year old girl, the one who loves to craft, sings loudly to *NSYNC with abandon, who walks through life not worrying about what people think of her. In a weird way, having a child brought me back to one.
I plan on using my thirties loving my family, pouring into my passions, and building friendships. Childhood will inevitably bring moments to Sully where he questions if he’s enough; I’m not naive enough to think he’ll be immune to the same insecurities that plagued me. I do hope, though, he can see me walking in who God made me and pursue his best, authentic self. There are the trite sayings of “29 again” and various adages to deny getting older, but I don’t plan on adopting any of those. My life has only gotten better as the years past, so I won’t undermine the life I’m living with refusing to acknowledge my age. Cheers to being thirty, flirty, and covered in spit up!
