Make Me Feel Young

A Your Mom post.

I realized I’d become a real Los Angelina earlier this year when it dawned on me how much I enjoy talking on the phone now. I used to hate it - it felt like a burden to get on the phone - but now that I live in LA, I spend so much time in my car, I’ve fallen in love with my phone calls. I call my mom, I call my dad, I call my husband, I call my friends.

I’ve fallen in love with my phone calls and I’ve fallen in love with my friends.

Last week, on my drive home from drop off, I was on the phone with Emily, my best friend in New York. She and I talk on the phone almost every day! Almost every day!!!!!! She’s part of a soccer league of moms who like to play together in her neighborhood in Brooklyn, and we were talking about that, and about mom friends in general, and what makes a friend a mom friend vs a friend who also has kids (a mom friend is one who you meet through your kids or through school or whatever), just yadda yadda yadda, and then one of us had to jump off the phone, I can’t remember who, and afterwards I felt so energized! I felt full of ideas!

I called another friend.

What I’m realizing is that all the times I used to go out and try to feel young again, try and get that wheeeee back, that giddyness and appetite for life I had in my early 20s - the only thing that gives me that rush, a real rush, is being with other 40 year-old women. I want to grab their arms when I’m telling them a story, I want to cut class and go get Slurpees. Smoke cigs and talk about Ryan Gosling.

I always expected the phase of life I’m currently in (the mystery of who I’d marry and whether I’d have kids solved, a career established, adulthood reached) would feel….not bad, but not good either. Boring. In my youth I gazed up the road at what lay ahead and thought….meh. I think I’ll kick the can down here in party-ville a little longer. I thought I’d reach my mid-thirties and long for my twenties, long for the rush of being let into a club with a fake ID. Perched on the backrest of a banquette at 4 AM, feeling beautiful. I thought nothing would ever compare to feeling like I could have anything I wanted in that moment, all I had to do was ask. Clutching my best friend’s hand, dancing together, shoo’ing away the suitors and tossing our hair in their wake.

Ugh.