The times, they are a-changin’

Milestones.

Life is full of them. Being born. Learning to walk and talk. The first day of kindergarten. Losing your first tooth. Turning 10 and entering double-digits, then turning 13 and becoming an official teenager. Learning to drive, becoming an adult (at least on paper) and getting to vote, buy cigarettes, and die for your country...then waiting three more years before you can drink. (Please tell me how that one makes sense.) Graduating from college. Your first “for real” job. Getting married. Having babies. These are all things we celebrate in one way or another.

But what about the milestones no one ever really wants to hit?

Your first broken bone. Getting braces. Your first pimple. Your first breakup. Your first hangover. Your first really terrible haircut, which you got in your hungover, brokenhearted state.

I talked to one of my friends in England this week. She had some news. It wasn’t great.

I’ve gotten to the point, at thirty-something, where most of my friends who are going to get married have already gotten around to it. We’re still in the first round of babies, barring a couple of outliers. But I have now hit a truly shitty milestone: the first divorce.

It was a shock, I’m not gonna lie. It took the rest of the day for my chin to come up off the floor. We like to think that our friends and loved ones are exempt from the divorce rate--at least, I guess I do--and the thought that this would eventually, inevitably happen to someone I knew had yet to occur to me. But happen it has, and it’s horrible. If you subscribe to all that ‘Five Love Languages’ nonsense, my predominant one is ‘Acts of Service’, which means that it is figuratively killing me right now that I can’t really do anything to help my friend out in any tangible way. If we weren’t separated by most of a continent and an ocean, I would currently be occupying her spare room and helping with the school run, the laundry, whatever. But instead I’m here, thousands of miles away, unable to do much more than send daily obnoxiously saccharine messages and being an ear if she needs one.

I know, I know, being available to listen is just as important blah blah blah. It just doesn’t feel like enough, okay?

If you think about it, at a certain point in life the milestones just start being bleak. Financial issues, job issues, expected deaths, unexpected deaths, diseases...and no one gets out of here alive. Death is the ultimate milestone. There is a literal stone on top of you for eternity. “Here lies Gerald. He was okay, we guess.” There comes a time in life where people start to lean into the whole ‘one foot in the grave’ thing. My mother used to refer to telephone conversations with my grandmother as ‘getting the doom-and-gloom report’. “So-and-so has pneumonia again and you remember what happened last time--they don’t think she’ll make it through again. Oh, and her husband has something, but they can’t figure out what. I read the obituaries this morning and I knew six people, can you imagine?” That’s a morbid milestone, when you start reading the obituaries to find out how many friends you have left. Oy…

It’s not like everything automatically goes to shit at your ‘Use By’ date--mostly because people don’t have ‘Use By’ dates--but at some point I think everyone finds themselves looking around, thinking Can a person catch a break? And it’s not like there aren’t breaks, either. Just because I don’t get excited about babies doesn’t mean other people don’t, and so they have them and get their kicks vicariously through their small humans. Of course, they also get the flip side of small humans, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole today. Our friends do cool things and we enjoy that. We get cool jobs or join cool clubs or have cool hobbies. We travel. We meet new friends. We fall in love. We buy new houses. We get pets. We get fun new technological toys and hide away in our houses with our pets and do all of our hobbies digitally and hang out with our friends digitally and—

Oh, snap. A milestone. And a cultural one, at that. We’ve reached the age of total isolation and dependence on technology!

Okay, exaggeration.

For now...