My Decade to Play

I spend the morning of my birthday reading a middle-grade novel about a girl named Arden, who lives in a tiny house with her parents, her brother, and a dog. Today, I am thirty, and I live in the house I grew up in, built by my parents in 1997.

Arden has a contract with her parents: this school year, she needs to avoid making everything into an argument and use her words when she's feeling upset.

Yesterday, at a stoplight coming home from brunch, after my boyfriend called to tell me that he couldn't come to my birthday party, I emitted a series of snarls, profanities, and screams. In Wegman's, as I marched to the liquor section, I texted my mom that I needed to get in a workout before my party and that I was going to ask everyone to come for five o'clock instead of four. I read her reply that that would be rude, and my eye twitched as I searched the shelves for Kendall Jackson Chardonnay. I cried in the too-long line at checkout, then scrolled through recipes for macaroni and cheese and new variations of cinnamon rolls, disappointed that I was damaging the one precious attention span that I would need if I were ever really going to be a writer.

I busted into the kitchen and threw the bag of gluten-free crackers and dinner rolls—last-minute purchases that we needed for my party—on the counter, where my mother and brother received my tantrum with knowing nods and a hug.

Why can't a birthday ever go right? Why throw a party for a woman who's thirty and still living at home?

Why have I wasted my twenties being a teacher if my salary can't even provide the tiny house that I've wanted since I was sixteen?

Arden lives in a tiny house. I envy an eleven-year-old.

My vice principal recently shared that she worked away her twenties. I've catalogued my decade with color-coded due dates on my calendars and weekly planners, with checks in my habit tracker which measure when I've read, when I've sent thank-you notes, when I've done yoga, when I've taken time to write—signals that I've done something instead of nothing, tricks I play to feel productive even though I'm still unpublished.

For the last week, I've tried in vain to compile a bunch of lessons and principles from the last decade. Early one morning last week, I scribbled at my desk, my memory darting about like a spotlight searching for the right words to describe the color of the paint on the disheveled cabinets in the room above the kitchen in the cape-style house I shared with my ex in Montana: the room where I started my master's in creative writing and first met Dr. Elisabeth Sharp McKetta, who wrote the story about Arden. When I couldn't decide between teal or aquamarine, I skipped a few lines and wrote about my dad, who was in the kitchen grunting, humming, mumbling to himself as he poured frozen hash browns on the nonstick pan that I've scratched. My dad, who even at six o'clock in the morning, is the only distraction I can't avoid.

My dad, who two weeks ago tried to give me a birthday gift—a check for over two-hundred dollars to cover the costs of the fees for the exams I needed to take if I wanted to become a licensed educator in the state of Massachusetts. He'd given it to me after we'd gotten into a fight; I'd told him that he was "so loud" in the morning, and he'd reminded me that my five o'clock alarm woke him up, too. To him, the gift was a peace offering; to me, the gift was a resented charity to the daughter that he never imagined would still live at home at thirty. So, I tore it up in front of him.

My dad grinned when I apologized. The whole thing really was ridiculous.

Do any of us ever really grow up?

Part of the joy of living at my parents' house is that I live with my mother. Every morning, she looks out at the ducks and swans that glide about, making figures in the pond; she imagines and sometimes even impersonates that they are all gossiping with one another. My mother, who sometimes counts the turtles lined up on the fallen tree trunk, their shells reflecting the light like a village of tents.

"They don't worry about social distancing," she says.

My mother, who during lockdown imagined that one of the swans, Genevieve, was cheating on her husband, Oscar, another swan, with the heron named Simon, who is appealing simply because he's unattached and he can stand on one leg. She told me all of this over Zoom, back when I lived in Montana. Sometimes in the springtime, when the birds return, the story continues.

My mother, who makes up stories about elves that live under rocky lean-tos and use moss as carpeting. We sometimes joke that my mother could author a children book: Ellen and the Elves.

I envy my mother because she is always making up stories. I envy Arden because she's always using blankets to build a den where she can retreat with her books. Arden lines up her dolls at a desk and pretends to be their teacher, and she adopts a dog that her neighbors abandoned. Arden has an aunt named Les who tells her that she's wholesome, like whole wheat bread.

Today, I am thirty, reading a children's book on the loveseat in the loft designed by my mother, who wanted to be an architect and is now the president of a bank but still finds play in all places. My mother, who always reminds me to lighten up.

I leave for yoga class without making my bed. Yoga: the activity that for years was a project in my planner. Maybe in this decade I can replace projects with play.

On the way to the studio, I pass a bit of preservation forestland and imagine that fairies fly between the twinkling, fiery leaves. In my next decade, I resolve to read more fairy tales.