One thing that has surprised me about life is how many different lifetimes I am actually fitting into this one life.

I am only 42 years old, but here are, approximately, all the lifetimes I have lived:

1983-1992: Pre-divorce childhood

1992-1998ish: Post-divorce childhood

1999-2002: High School

2002-2006: College

2006-2012: Young adult years in New York City

2013-2021: Young motherhood years as a stay-at-home parent

2022-2024: Weird lost years when I wasn’t working but the kids were both in school full-time, weekly existential crisis and bored out of my mind but damn I hate volunteering

2024-present: working half-time with older kids, living the dream

You could potentially collapse those last two eras into one, and that would still leave me with seven distinct lifetimes within this one life. And if all goes according to plan, I am only halfway through!

There are so many other ways to divide up my life.

What about time zones?
1983-1984: Central Time
1984-2002: Pacific Time
2002-2006: Central Time
2006-2012: Eastern Time
2012-2026: Central TIme

Camping
1983-2002: Camping years
2002-2012: Non-camping years
2013-2021: Camping years
2021-present: Non-camping years

Cabin Ownership
1983-2021: No cabin
2021-present: Cabin

Number of Living Parents
1983-2019: Two parents
2019-present: One parent

And it’s interesting to think about how these things overlap. I could list the years that I’ve lived with a piano and the years I have lived with a cat and they would be roughly the same, but not quite. My knitting years line up very neatly with those young adult years in New York City.

I think I have finally entered the part of life where there will be fewer changes. Adulthood and parenthood are supposed to be a long plod where nothing changes and you’re just fixing up shit that breaks around your house and getting your kid through their education and puberty.

It does feel like my life has held more lifetimes than most people. My childhood comes in a set of two due to the divorce. Moving to New York City as a young adult created a distinct NYC lifetime. When I stopped working to stay home with the kids that broke things up further, and then the pandemic and my inability to figure out what to do with my life (and my struggle to figure out what had changed with job applications in the fifteen years since I had last applied to anything) gave me that weird little interregnum of boredom and wondering if I would spend the rest of my life just cleaning and cooking.

So I think there is less change ahead, although we will eventually become empty nesters (maybe?), and then have to deal with retirement. I think the chances of becoming a grandparent are fairly low (I think this is true for all millennial parents, not just me), but then there’s the ultimate or penultimate lifetime that I am very much eagerly anticipating: assisted living.