Twenty Something, Or Twenty Nothing?

I’m about to be 27, which is not a big deal but I’m definitely feeling that sense of the looming “adult” set in. Maybe it’s the new apartment and the hubby’s new job, or maybe, “GASP,” my biological clock is actually tick-tocking to the point that I’ll have to face it, one way or another.

For years now I’ve felt like, bring on age 30, what’s the big deal? Bring on the mortgage payment, a screened in porch, bottle of wine, and kids asleep with my man in his recliner burping up high life and complaining about work. I’m ready! I’m sick of living paycheck to paycheck, sick of credit cards substituting savings accounts. I’m ready for the family-economy wagon, worrying about what to make for dinner instead of dropping another $20 bucks on take out, and I’m super ready to feel a sense of home outside of the physical realm that is wherever my husband and the dog are.

Life is never what you think it will be, this much I know in my nearly thirty years of life on this planet. You can plan and set goals all you want but life changes from moment to moment. It’s best to just go with the flow. 10 years ago, my view of the world was completely different. I had completely different ideas of what I wanted or needed and I certainly could’ve never guessed I’d end up where I am now.

Some days I get bummed out that I don’t have a big, grown up, high paying job. True to the Lodjic-girl way, my father raised three smart girls with hefty educations and degrees who don’t work in their field and don’t get to use that degree for more than making others feel stupid from time to time. Unlike my sisters, however, I adopted the Chriss name so at least I have that to make “the cheese stand alone.”

There is something strangely gratifying about working for a living; going into work, coming home and having a steady paycheck. There’s something even more gratifying about looking back at where my husband and I evolved from. My man literally started in a dish pit and is now a head chef, menu creator and pioneer of a brand new, hit restaurant in the Tampa Bay area. I was a spoiled brat with dreams of being an overpriced, bitch lawyer who desperately wanted to go to Pepperdine or Berkeley who ended up at University of Oregon with a Magazine Journalism degree and married to the best man she’d ever met before 30. I once vowed that I would never marry before 30 and almost asked my best friend who is gay to give me some of his genetics so we could created the most sassy child on the planet and I would be a bad-ass single mother conquering the professional world. Clearly I watch too many films of this nature, but life certainly does write its own tune and we’re just singing along!

It definitely doesn’t help that all over Facebook are friends creating families and careers that make my commission-based position look like a promotion at McDonald’s, but another thing I’ve learned is that you either work to live, or live to work and we kind of walk that line. But with that TICK, TOCK that don’t stop also comes the haunting question: Are you a Twenty-SOMETHING or a Twenty-NOTHING?

Define something and nothing? I feel like we’ve got something…at least a little something going for us. We’re certainly able to triumph over the dramatics of this life, even though more often than not we’re the creators of such things. We are able to still love each other even when we really want to scream and throw things. And, we are always able to laugh. We’ve even managed to find some amazing people to laugh at us, with us and around us along the way.

In terms of nothing, well this is certainly nothing like what we’d imagined all those years ago. My man was supposed to be a rocking drummer in a famous band and we’d occasionally meet on tour when I was covering other bands and writing for Rolling Stone magazine. After that dream was squashed we were going to put my man in a high-priced culinary school and live with family to save up for our dreams while I got a fabulous job in Miami or West Palm and a prominent publication. Then that went up in smoke we just planned a wedding, a cross-country move and said, “We’ll just figure out the rest when we get there,” and we did, and we have.

Now I’m not under and magical illusion that we didn’t need some help along the way. We certainly had a lot of support from our friends, family and loved ones but we’ve nearly mastered the art of dealing with the piles of inconvenient happenings that life creates on a regular basis. I’ve said it once before and I’ll say it again, the storm we can handle, it’s the calm that makes us uneasy.

I think that for a twenty-something couple, us Chriss’s are doing pretty well at making sure that we are more than just some twenty-nothings in debt, in doubt and in denial but certainly love embracing our cynicism and sarcastic side to make the bad days feel a little lighter.

We had our moments of nothing, our loss of loved ones in our family, saying goodbye to friends and the people we once couldn’t picture not being part of our lives. But from that nothingness came something, the stuff of which bore our amazing relationship. I still sit back in awe from time to time at how we’ve come to be us, how we’ve creating this “something.”

So yeah, our twenties may be on the down-slope and we may have days where we have no idea where we’re going but at least we’ll have each other for the ride, and that’s definitely a “something” for our twenties, rather than a nothing!