1. Although this body has birthed 2 children and carried me across the finish line of a half marathon, I will never get used to the way it looks now. I am coming to accept that I will likely never lose the 20 pounds I should, or the 40 pounds I would like... I will forever long for the body I had at 17. Unfortunately, at 17 I didn't know what I had and I used it in all the wrong ways for all the wrong reasons. So at almost 40 this body is older (dear God, soooo much older!), but hopefully wiser.
2. I will never tire of watching movies and shows, or reading books that take place in a highschool and are full of teenaged angst and romance. This of course is a manifestation of my never ending wish for a high school do-over ... my desire to live a John Hughes movie.... As the girl who spent her high school years loving someone who would never love her back, I wish that I could go back and talk to 15 (16, 17) year old me and let her know that I had a choices to make, and that the ones I was making weren't the right ones, but in the end, it would all work out.
3. I should have loved my hair when it was naturally bright, shiny RED. Being a red head was not easy and my days were spent longing to look like Darryl Hannah in Splash. I wanted long, curly, blond hair, not the awkward, poker straight, poorly styled hair I spent a lot of time with. But now that the red is fading and mother nature needs a helping hand, I feel like I am living the natural consequences of wishing the red away (I get flashbacks thinking about those horrible "sun-in" days!).
4. At almost 40 my personality is set, and there are only a handful of people in this world who will truly accept me for who I really am: bossy, judgemental and highly temperamental (remember that red hair), who often gets worked up over trivial matters. That being said, I think I've also proven myself to be generous and usually kind. I think the next 40 years are going to be spent trying to cultivate the positive aspects of my personality while trying to reign in some of the less desirable ones. And while I know that I can be exhausting, my heart is usually in the right place. I am happy that I've got people in my life who realize that, and I also need to let go of worrying about those who don't.
5. I don't think I'll ever cease wanting to be a nomad, however I've accepted that I will stay in one place to give my kids a sense of being "from" somewhere. If it were up to me, we would live in a different country every 2 years, but having lived the consequences of leaving one's hometown for good, I want my kids to have lifelong friendships that you just can't really cultivate when moving all over the world ( that and the fact that we could never afford to live all over the world -- minor detail!)
6. At almost 40, I am starting to realize that I may very well never make a huge impact on the world. When I was young, I wanted to be important somehow -- a famous educator or author -- something. Now, I am just going to focus on making an impact on my world, by being a good person and helping where I can. It's not easy to give up dreams of making a big difference somewhere, but the hope is that by making a little difference, it might end up snowballing into something bigger.
7. No matter how much I try or how many home magazines I subscribe to, I don't have it in me to put everything in its place. Mine will forever be the house where our lives are on full display in all of their messy and disorganized glory. When you come over, I will attempt to distract you from the mess with food and drink ... and hope that you will come back for the company and not the decor!
8. The older I get the less I seem to care about showering before going out in public. It has gotten to the point where, when I do shower before the school run, my kids accuse me of being "fancy" ... and if I take the time to shower, wash my hair and put on makeup before heading out for groceries, people ask if I've got an "event" that day. In my youth I would never have imagined that I would leave the house without full hair and makeup. Last week I went for a run at 9:00 am and didn't shower until 8 am the next day! Maybe my 40th birthday resolution should be to shower more ...
I wish I could come up with numbers 9 and 10 to satisfy my desire for things to be neat and tidy (at least on paper)... but I had a beer before dinner and 2 glasses of wine with, and now, at almost 40, I'm pretty much done. I can only hope that at 50 I'm making a much more exciting list ... and then, maybe not. Maybe the key to aging well is some excitement, but not too much. Some nostalgia, but not too much. Some things you want to change ... but more that you want to stay just as they are. In the next 10 years I will have adult children and will be on to a very different stage in my life. I resolve that for the next 10 years I'll try to live in the present, let the past go at le