Things I regret now that I'm 29

This week I turn 29 years old. Typically, celebrating my birthday has always been a positive experience for me. I would make a countdown starting at the beginning of the month and announce to my family everyday how many days were left until my special day. This year however my birthday is joined with a bitter sadness as we held a funeral for my step dad who attempted suicide this year after a hard and tragic struggle with alcoholism and prescription meds. On Father’s Day weekend, we held a tree planting ceremony for my step dad in 115ºF weather in the Las Vegas desert, coming together for the first time in over a decade. Seeing all of my extended family again had all the opportunities to catch people up on my life. The last they saw me I was a young teen, graduating high school, fresh eyed and ready for anything. Now I am 29, two kids, married, and burying the ashes of my step father under a tree at a park he was responsible for landscaping. The conversations that insued about myself and my step dad led me to thinking about where I was now that I am 29 and where I want to go next.

The main topic of the conversations always starts with my kids. I was 20 years old when I had my daughter and had my son right before I turned 22. This year, my son was also diagnosed with type one diabetes, so many family members had questions about his health and our experience at the hospital. The whole experience with my son, understanding what he needed and how I needed to step up as a parent has been a challenging experience and has forced me to access my own power and authority to get him the things he has needed. Regardless of the positive part of the challenge and the strength its growing in me, its also unearthed a deep wound of my own lack of self worth and inability to make things happen for myself. I love my children and my life dearly, but I regret being so young when I became a parent. I wish so badly I had a plan for health insurance for them, for the long term. I wish I had money, I wish I had a plan, I wish I would have known what I was getting into. I’ve never been a long term thinker which was the biggest mistake when choosing to become a parent anyway. My partner and I have done an incredible job in providing our kids the stable emotional home life we felt they needed but at the same time it came at the cost of trying to find and maintain work that can support a family of 4 with insurance while also not slowly sucking the life out of us and killing all our joy. We are both self-employed and have tried to find our own way making money for ourselves and our family. We haven’t thrived by any means in the last ten years of building our family together, rather we have struggled to maintain freedom and still pay our bills. But now that we are faced with the need of insurance and medication for a super sick person, we have to make more choices now and rearrange what is to survive whats coming.

This internal pressure to provide has been there for a long time. It’s what led me into the career I am in now, which I hate. When I was pregnant with my daughter there was so much external pressure form the people outside of my life as to what I was going to do for work. I decided to try hair school which took me twice as long to complete because some days I couldn’t even drag myself to sit in the room for 4 hours that night and just complete my hours. I hated doing hair the moment I started it. I was intimidated but I was also being pressured to do something with my life so I continued on despite the resistance in my soul. For 5 years in fact, praying to quit every day I showed up the salon to meet with clients. I regret pushing myself to figure out what to do instead of allowing my life to unfold naturally. I push myself to think of the good ideas, but in my soul, I have to respond to what is actually true for my life. I can dream up a million business ventures that seemed "guaranteed" to be successful, but all that I can truthfully do is the work life has provided for me today. I realize I should have always lived this way. I used to think I needed the best plan and the most ideal life. But now I see that the way life happens is often times better than what I can plan and its my wish to let that happen more often.

All I wanted during my twenties was to provide something good for my children. I had such a strained relationship with my parents that when I became a parent I was determined to do better for them. I don’t know if I truly did though, by what measurement? Sure my parents might have been absent mentally and emotionally, but at least I always got the medical and dental and vision attention I needed exactly when I needed it. What I give my children in presence, my parents gave me in financial stability. What they didn’t teach me about believing in myself and making things happen for myself, I haven’t taught my kids about being responsible and structured and focused. I held onto my emotional grudge for far too long, and I regret not trying to repair my relationship with my parents. It’s too late now for some, my father, step mother and step father have all died unexpectedly. However, I still have my mother despite the pain in our connection. I have seen her change through my step father’s suicide and so I wonder if now is the time for us. Maybe now, with the time we have left I’ll be less personally offended by what was the past, and more inclined to create a better story for the future for the two of us.

And that leads me to the greatest understanding of my 29 years so far. The life I have lived was created by choice, even though I was unconscious to what I was choosing. I didn't realize I was trying to make hairdressing work for me because my parents said it was the best idea for me. I didn't realize I was just following along. I listened to the praise of my peers and those older than me and waiting for them to tell me what I would do. I watched what got the likes and tried to emulate that. But I never got what I wanted out of pretending to be like others. I see now that I regret ever trying to fit in. I wasted all of my twenties trying to prove I was [?????] fill in the blank. Stable, good parent, hard worker, ambitious, etc. But that was only an attempt to keep people close to me. Now that I am 29, and less likely to give my time, energy or effort to anything that doesn’t excite me fully, I see now that I missed out on so much of myself trying to be what people wanted me to be. I still don't quite know who I am, or how to define myself. This is more preferable to me though, because at least I am not just a copy of a copy of a copy of a person. Maybe now, without the pressure to fit in with my peers or family I will make more authentic decisions that will lead me to a happier reality that was curated by me on purpose.

This last year of my 20’s I hope I can come to terms with all of this. I hope by the time I turn 30, I’ll have the medical care my kid needs figured out, I’ll finally find my path, I’ll be closer with my mom and I’ll be more myself than I have ever been. I wish for my life to be mine and to be created by my conscious choices. I don’t want another birthday where I look back and realize how much of my life I gave away. This is the year I take the reigns and drive the ship. This is the year that I start to learn what it means to get what I want out of what life has offered to me so I don’t have to look back and see what I made as a disappointing type of thing. This is my life now, I’ll take it from here.