Game of chance at life’s crossroads
FOR the most part I trundle through life taking the rough with the smooth, the joy with the sadness and the fun with the mundane. However sometimes it takes the words of a stranger to look at life and think about decisions made.
We have entered debs/grads season, which involves a lot of middle-aged people who hardly know each other making small talk over glasses of prosecco. We make nice noises about our offspring who have grown-up overnight, we indulge sentimentality and entertain nostalgia. The conversation is light but most importantly – it’s kept going. Still, in the midst of the small talk, deep thoughts can be prompted as it was for me when it was alluded to that I married young and how I could be so sure so early on about that particular life-choice. It’s only in retrospect now that I can see the conversation wasn’t so light.
But it got me thinking; what if I hadn’t married and had my children young, which direction would my life have taken? Would I be in Africa building orphanages? Would I be in Wall Street building empires or would I have opted for Spain and a string of Latin lovers? Of course it can be argued that I could have done all those things regardless of being married with children. But I didn’t.
I wasn’t that young when I got married; 24 wasn’t an unreasonable age 24 years ago. But I suppose it was young enough to give up our 20s in deference to babies, buggies and budgets. The plan was to grow up with our kids and go mad in our 40s. The first part of the plan came true but the second stage proved elusive. By our 40s we might have been a long way towards rearing and steering our children but it is the marketing of them that kills the ‘wildness’ project. And the budget.
Yet just as it took a stranger for me to reflect, it took those closest to me to affirm, coming as it did in the guise of a birthday cake and a voucher from the kids. The cake celebrated the 50th birthday of the 25 year old guy I married and the voucher – a sky-dive at 12,000 ft- celebrated the kid our own kids grew up with - their 50 year old father.
So in answer to my thought-provoking prosecco-drinking stranger – who knows what age is the best age in which to make lifelong decisions? Certainly marrying young can be the rock on which we perish. But it can also be the flower we keep on watering. And as himself paves the way for me as he always does into a new decade, let’s hope along with the smooth and the rough, the fun and the mundane and the serious and the frivolous that we will continue to bloom, flower and jump out of aeroplanes.
Otherwise I’m off to Spain to find my string of Latin lovers!