While I try not to blame every complex I have in my life on being the youngest child with a sizable age gap, I do think my ongoing preoccupation with keeping up with my peers stems from that. It’s just something about years of being too young to stay up late or play a certain game or drink when everyone else was that keeps the issue semi-present.
In middle and high school, staying in lockstep with peers was easy, especially at a school with uniforms: wear the same Steve Madden platform loafers and have the right LL Bean backpack (deluxe in either spruce or eggplant) and you’re well on your way. At high school graduation, even though most of my friends from my graduating class of 39 headed to different schools, we were all still roughly on the same path. College graduation was the first time it felt like things started to split with various friends going around the world either to teach or on prestigious fellowships, some headed straight to grad school, some taking a year or two to figure it out in random places, and a bunch headed to New York largely to be investment bankers.
I was in the New York cohort but wanted to work at a magazine and since “The Devil Wears Prada” hadn’t come out (the movie, not the book), I didn’t get the memo that my Banana Republic sweater set was not going to get me a job at Conde Nast. I wound up in Marketing and was surrounded by 20-somethings at different points on their “I’ve got my shit together” journey.
Since I have been forced to be Class Secretary for my all girls school for nearly 25 years, I have always kept tabs on the various waves we’ve rolled through. Early & mid-twenties were all about grad school and running marathons. I opted for the latter and didn’t train nearly enough for the Disney marathon, only crossing the finish line because my oldest brother ran with me from mile 13 to mile 19 — that “I have to keep up with my older siblings” instinct in full effect.
When we were in our late-20s and early-30s, it was all about getting married. The year I got married, I was invited to nine weddings in a five month window. And then our 30s became about career advancement and having kids with updates alternating between making partner and “welcoming baby boy #2 to the family!” Except that, unlike my peers, I was doing the college tour circuit at 31 and started paying college tuition for Oldest at 33; at 37 I was an empty nester, since we sent Youngest to boarding school mid-Covid. Overall, I was on a path I didn’t expect, didn’t prepare for, and was running parallel to my friends instead of crossing over.
There’s lots of ways anyone can feel like an outsider, obviously, and it’s often subtle at first, but then one day you look around and the vast majority of your friends have a shared experience that you can’t relate to. It manifests in myriad ways starting from memes on Instagram sharing “bump” pics to realizing just how hard it is to make friends as an adult when you don’t have kids in the local school system. (Not that it worked out all that well when I did).
The handful of friends who’ve also chosen baby-free paths either stayed in cities where they already knew people or opted for the “frequent traveler/digital nomad” life which sounds amazing once all kids are out of school and/or I don’t have two travel-anxious toy poodle dependents.
None of it stops you from loving or enjoying your friends but you do find when you get together that you feel the difference. You’ve made the mistake in the past of sharing too much about a challenging time you had with one of your kids and saw their faces shift when you talked about it or heard the awkward pause before “wow… that’s a lot…” They’re absolutely right, it was a lot, and while there was no malice coming from them, it’s just another reminder of the gap. It becomes easier to shift the conversation back to someone’s preschooler hitting other kids — a problem that feels miles away from mine.
You try to talk about safe things like TV shows but are met with “how do you have so much time to watch TV? I basically stopped watching when Roscoe was born.” Again, there’s no unkindness intended, and they do have less kid-free time, but when you already feel like you’re on a totally different journey, that comment lands like a dig. You show up at the baby shower and bring books that your husband tells you your kids loved when they were three, but you didn’t know any of them then so you try to stay on the periphery of conversation until post-present unwrapping and post-pregnancy symptom/birth discussion.
I wasn’t able to attend my 20th college reunion in June but so many of the updates I got were just pictures of kids on a playground. And I’d reply “who do these children belong to?” only to learn they belonged to former classmates I barely remember. Initially, I found it so interesting that anyone would think sharing pictures of the child of someone you haven’t talked to since college (and didn’t talk to that much then) would be more interesting than sharing the positive and occasionally catty life updates you’d hoped for. Then you realize, that picture of that six year old is the life update. And, frankly, maybe if you cared at all about Steve, you’d be interested in Steve’s kids — because you are incredibly interested and invested in the lives of your friend’s kids.
Candidly, part of you is jealous — not of the life itself, but of how straightforward it seems. Jealous that while you love your husband and are proud of the adults your kids have grown into, this choice you made has made things harder. It’s harder to parent when you’re the stepparent. It’s harder to find community when so much community-building for women from 35-50 is centered around school-age kids. It’s harder to find a peer group that understands you.
I certainly wouldn’t trade my life: I love knowing that I can watch intense BBC dramas with my husband at 6:30 PM and go to bed at 9:30. I also understand that while I’ve made trade-offs, my friends on more traditional paths have too, from compromising their schedules and sanity to not being able to cook or eat what they like to a million other sacrifices and choices unique to them. In some cases, they don’t want to be friends with their kids’ friends’ moms, so while they have access to that network, it’s a minus and not a plus.
I was once given career advice that you should never run from something (a boss you hated, terrible work, etc), but always run to something. Ultimately, that’s the reframe I’ve been working on: how can I be at peace with my path and know that there will be some visits or text exchanges that make the chasm feel wider than ever? How can I come to terms with the fact that “keeping up” (outside of with the Kardashians) is a wasted effort? We’re all on our own paths, moving at our own speeds, and all just trying to get through whatever hand we’ve been dealt, whether traditional or not.
