I’m not being dramatic when I say that I’ve spent the last year of my life preparing for 30. For those of you who are just a wee bit older than I am and think my last statement is ridiculous, don’t worry. I intend to explain myself.

For me, 30 has come to represent two things: (1) official adulthood (i.e., no more excuses for not having your life/shit together), and (2) the shattered image of who I thought I’d be.

#1 is self-explanatory: The 20s are a semi-grace period, a practice round, if you will, for adulthood. Try it out. Sleep around. Work a few jobs. Go back to school. Find your passion. In other words, if you’re 25 and still haven’t settled on a career path or figured out what the hell you’re doing with your life, it’s all good, baby. You have plenty of time! Whereas, if you’re 30, and someone asks you what you do for a living, and you say, “You know, I haven’t figured that out just yet,” you might as well say that you’re a big fat loser living in your parents’ basement with no money and no job prospects. Because that’s what they’ll see.

#2 is a little more complicated. The shitty thing about 30 is that I had an image attached to the number. When I was 15, and I thought about 30-year-old Julie, she was a Grown-Up. Twenty-five-year-old Julie wasn’t really a concern back then. But 30-year-old Julie—man, was she cool. She had a job that she loved, writing a column for a local newspaper. She was married to an awesomely cute man. She lived in a house. And she had a kid, perhaps with another one on the way.

Thirty-year-old Julie didn’t worry about how she’d afford next month’s rent, or whether or not her nine-year-old car would last another year or two without killing her. She certainly wasn’t going out on bad date after bad date, wondering if she’d ever meet the right guy. She wasn’t living alone or doing her own taxes or taking out her own trash; she wasn’t babysitting her friend’s kid on a Saturday night or fishing dead mice out from under her oven; she wasn’t broke or paying for her own health insurance or wondering if her life was ever going to get any easier.

When I hit 29, I realized, quite obviously, that my life was nowhere near where I once thought it would be. What the fuck had I accomplished? How had my choices led me to this? When I toasted my 29th year, I announced, semi-humorously, that if I was still unemployed and single—I was both at the time—when the clock struck 30, I’d put a gun to my head.

After turning 29, I spent the next few months battling a debilitating depression. Partly because I hated my new job, partly because I missed graduate school and all that it represented, and partly because I was mourning the death of an image I’d been holding onto for 15 years.

Assuming that I would be in exactly the same place at 30, I was determined to not only accept my fate, but also feel content with where I was and who I am. It may sound cheesy or new-agey, but I focused all of my energies on the things that I did have: the world’s most amazing friends, good parents and a swell brother who support me no matter what, a close relationship with the smartest, most beautiful baby ever, an apartment I love (in spite of the mice), and the ability, will, and confidence to write.

I learned how to make these things be enough, to fill the holes created by other absences, like a fulfilling day job and a person with whom to share all parts of my life. My life was where it was, and I had finally embraced the fact that, even if it wasn’t what I’d imagined, I was where I was supposed to be.

Then, a funny thing happened: I got laid off from my job. For a brief moment, I panicked. Now I really would be unemployed and single when I turned 30, and everything I’d worked so hard to accomplish would crumble and crash around me.

Oddly enough, that’s not what happened.

Instead, to fill my free time, I started writing again. I got published. I picked up some freelance work. And, best of all, an editor at a magazine I’d written for a few years ago contacted me and asked me to write another article for her.

Other things happened, too. Like, I landed a full-time job in an economy that worsens by the second. And I love it. With regard to my personal life, without revealing too much for fear of jinxing it, I will say that I didn’t spend my birthday weekend alone.

When I think too hard and too long about how my life has changed in the last year, I’ll admit, it scares the crap out of me. As a person who spends so much of her time preparing for the worst-case scenarios, I don’t quite know how to handle the best. On the upside, I also never take a single experience, person, or moment for granted.

So, there you have it: I’m 30 and I’m happy to be here. I’m even a little hopeful. But, more importantly, at this moment, sitting here, writing this, I know with certainty that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

(And my writing.) As you know, I blog for Fringe Magazine. Currently, Fringe is in need of a new Web site—for reasons explained here—and could use your help. Even if all you can give is $5, it would go a long way toward helping the magazine. (And me.)

[I apologize in advance: This is a long one. And kind of sappy.]

Yesterday, I turned 30. I plan to devote an entire blog post to this milestone, but in the meantime, I’ve been thinking about my family.

Birthdays will do that to you, I suppose. Especially if you’re used to getting a phone call from a family member on your birthday, and this year you didn’t get it, because you may or may not be speaking to her, due to something you may or may not still be mad about.

My mom’s side of the family, which I was very close to at one point in time, has undergone some, how shall we phrase it, major upheavals over the last year and a half. It, well, it hasn’t been pretty.

Though I didn’t get the phone call I’d come to expect, I did get an unexpected and thoughtful gift from another family member, a gift that reminded me that no matter what crazy shit they stir up, no matter how much they hurt or disappoint you, family is for life. It may start and stop and ebb and flow, but ultimately, it’s not going anywhere. This is, of course, both a good and a bad thing.

After receiving the gift, I felt so nostalgic and thrown and touched that I dug up something I wrote about the subject five years ago. It’s a little rough around the edges, but, amazingly, it still holds some truth.

Because I’m now officially old, and old people like to reflect on the past, I’m posting my 2004 scribblings below.

*****

The Simplest, Most Complicated Relationships in the World

My mom and I haven’t been speaking to each other a whole lot lately.

I’m holding a grudge. She’s giving me my “space.” Though neither of us would admit to the other that this is what we’re doing, this is what we’re doing.

Funny how, even though we’ve know each other my whole life, even though she birthed me and named me and raised me and instilled values in me, even though we’ve seen each other at our worst and our best and naked, slapped each other, comforted each other, cried together, rejoiced together, we still have yet to find a way to effectively communicate.

“Couldn’t you tell your mom why you’re upset with her?” a friend asked me.

“What would be the point?” I said. “I would tell her how I felt, she’d feel hurt and defensive, twist it around and chalk it up to ‘Julie just being dramatic again,’ and then she’d say something like, ‘Well I guess I’m just the worst mother in the world,’ making me feel like an asshole, when, really, she’s the one being the asshole!” [In retrospect, we were both being assholes.]

In other words, telling her that she hurt me or that I’m mad at her for hurting me would get us nowhere. Because, as I’m quickly learning, family doesn’t change, and our relationships with our family members stay the same, no matter what we do or say to try to change them. Big brothers will always not take us seriously, even when we’re married and old enough to be having kids of our own. Big sisters will always have an opinion about our lives and feel the need to vocalize it. Little brothers will always call us in need of advice. Little sisters will always have a hard time accepting our significant others. And parents will always find ways to offend us, hurt us or generally piss us off.

When I think about my family, I’m a hamster, going round and round on my little treadmill, getting nowhere faster and faster. It’s tiring. Exhausting, really.

This hamster, therefore, would prefer to just stay still.

Unfortunately, staying still just makes that gulf between us, that inability to communicate, deepen and widen and deepen some more.

There are days when I think: Why not try? Why not just call her and tell her why I’m upset and break down and let her make everything okay, the way moms are supposed to do. The way she always has, until now.

But then the daughter in me kicks in, the daughter that, again, will never change, and I think: No. She should call me. Ask me what I need from her. Tell me that she’s sorry and sad that I’m hurting.

And the fact that she hasn’t done this only makes me madder, makes the grudge last, the gulf deepen, me sadder.

The thing about family, though, is that despite the fact that nothing ever changes, despite the fact that we’ve been trying to make change happen for just about as long as we’ve been alive, we never seem to stop wanting it. Hoping for it. Trying.

When I got home late last night, after a long and somewhat crappy, gloomy day, my stomach in knots, the message light on my answering machine was blinking.

I pressed play.

“Hi, honey, it’s Mom. I’m leaving the gym now and am on my way to meet Ruth for a quick bite,” she said, or rather, yelled into the speakerphone in her car. “But I wanted to call you, because I miss you, and I was thinking about you. I’ve also noticed that all the new spring lines are out right now, with some really pretty spring colors. And I thought about how pretty you are, and how you’d look really good in some of the outfits I’ve seen. So I want you to use my credit card and buy yourself two or three new outfits, okay? Because you deserve them, and will look so pretty in them. Okay? Call me back or e-mail me at work tomorrow. I love you, honey. Bye.”

The message ended, and I was torn: laugh or cry? I opted for a little of both.

Sometimes, no matter what you do or say, nothing changes, and it makes you cry. It makes you mad. It makes you want to scream. But then, other times, no matter what you do or say, nothing changes; nothing changes, and the fact that nothing changes is so touching, so heartbreaking, it makes you cry. It makes you want to sing.

I’ve got a new post up at Fringe Magazine. 

Same old questions; still waiting on those answers.

Life has been good to me as of late. I’ve had some successes both personally and professionally, and I’m actually quite—dare I say it—happy.

If you know me, you know that I don’t always do well with happy. To put it mildly, happiness freaks me the fuck out. Why, might you ask, am I afraid to be happy? It’s an excellent question and one that I’ve spent many years trying to answer in therapy. From what I’ve gathered after 30 years of life with my exhausting brain, the gist is this: The minute I allow myself to be happy, my world immediately turns to shit.

Happiness for me tends to bring with it a big ticking bomb of heartbreak and despair. So I don’t trust it, even when I’m working very, very hard to enjoy it while it lasts and live in the moment and all of those other things my friends repeatedly tell me to do.

Again, if you know me, you also know that there is one thing I fear more than happiness. One thing I fear above all other things.

This fear is small and furry and currently stuck in a glue trap under my oven, where it will live and die until someone who loves me comes over and removes it from my apartment.

It’s a lesson I know well, but one that I finally have the perfect words for: When the fates hand me happiness, they also hand me a mouse.

I have a new post up at Fringe Magazine.

Also worth reading: the magazine’s tributes to the late John Updike. Additionally, one of my favorite writers, Lorrie Moore, wrote an excellent tribute in the New York Times.