Hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it...

So here’s an embarrassing little tidbit I realized recently. When I listen to the song “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen (no, that’s not the embarrassing part), not only do I sing the lyrics (still not the embarrassing part) but I also wink at nobody in particular when he sings “....in the wink of a young girl’s eye....”. I noticed I was doing that the other day as I was singing along with the Boss while changing Kostyn’s diaper. I suspect I’ve probably been doing it since the song came out, way back when I actually WAS a young girl. And now it’s just instinctive.

Kostyn got a kick out of the way his mama’s eye kept twitching, but I was thinking to myself what a fraud I was for acting out such a line at my age. Just a few days shy of 36. Wearing sweatpants and wrestling with a poopy diaper at the time, it dawned on me that instead of the winking young girl, I could now pass for the middle-aged divorcée in the song, the one who sits around her kitchen table after the kids are in bed, talkin’ ‘bout the old times.

Yikes.

Honestly though, I’m not really troubled about turning 36. I mean, ask me again in four years when I’m teetering on the precipice of 40, but for now I find being on the “wise” side of 35 to be no big deal. The cool thing about having Kostyn (and soon his little brother, Evan) is that even though it seems like he’s aging me at lightning speed because of how much energy I spend chasing him around and worrying about him, he actually gives me this magical “timeless” effect, in a way, by the way he looks at me.

To him, at least right now, there is no age attached to me, and there won’t be for years. I’m old enough to kiss his boo-boos and young enough to dance around the living room with him, and I’m willing to bet that’s the perfect age in his eyes.

I think about the fact that my mom was 28 when she had me, and my dad was 31. Today, to me, that seems so young! But I suspect at the time there were days they felt old, caring for a 3-year-old and a new baby, with my younger sister not far behind in the mix.

Yet I never considered them old or young — or, really, anything other than “Mom” and “Dad” — until sometime in my teenage years. (That’s when they suddenly became 800 years old and completely out of touch. Sorry Mom and Dad, it happens to all parents -- it’ll happen to me, I’m sure -- and it luckily fades with time, especially when your kid has kids of her own.)

I guess my point here is that while I may stress about the alarming number of wrinkles showing up on my face, and how these “freckles” on my hands are seriously beginning to resemble AGE SPOTS, for now I’m choosing to focus on the way Kostyn looks at me when he bounds into the room and exclaims, “Hi Mama!!”

Makes me feel young. ;)