“You’re gonna love your thirties – it’s the BEST,” a particular brand of female acquaintance would chirp at parties, with the kind of cheer that made me instantly suspicious of anything she found joy in. The implication, of course, was that this elusive new decade would finally release me from the reckless, self-destructive behaviors of my twenties and usher in the long-awaited era of True Adulthood™. I was reasonably terrified. Where I come from, your thirties are for child-rearing, career peaks, and perhaps buying some property. But I happened to live in Berlin, where fifty is really the new thirty, and it’s considered perfectly regular for a 34-year-old to be in a k-hole on a Tuesday with their two ENM partners – so clearly my priorities were a little “off”. As my therapist had put it: “I don’t think you’re nearly as traditional as you think you are” – a rather aggravating observation I had naturally refuted on the spot and then stewed over for weeks.
Three days before my big 3-0 getaway to my father’s house in the south of France, which he’d kindly lent to me and 15 of my closest friends, I met a couple of girlfriends for drinks. I sat outside with a glass of wine, unwinding from the day, until they both arrived.
“You are GLOWING,” one of them said as she hugged me. To be fair, my skin had been great lately.
“Maybe you’re pregnant,” the other blurted out in that nonchalant hot-girl-way that made her both intimidating and extremely charming. We laughed and riffed on it for a few minutes before moving on to more pressing matters, like celebrity birthdays and whose zodiac sign got the best ones. The next morning, I bought a pregnancy test on my way to work, despite being late as always. I walked in and greeted my team, busy setting up for the day ahead, and bee-lined for the bathroom.
It was a small, red-painted toilet stall, with some music awards hung up on the wall, which without fail forced me to wonder what the fuck I was doing scanning people’s eyeballs for a crypto company instead of literally anything remotely fulfilling. I think I already knew before I even bought the test, but of course I was desperately attempting to convince myself it was just stress. It came back positive immediately – within seconds, as if to mock me. You were that pregnant and you didn’t even realize it? Are you even a real woman?
I did not cry. I did not panic. I went straight into problem-solving mode, as any good control-freak first-born daughter of a jew would. There was only a two-day window during which my best friend and I would have the house to ourselves before everyone else arrived, so I sat on a much-too-sunny bench outside of work for two hours, calling every clinic and hospital in and around Marseille in order to schedule all necessary steps of this major stint in my birthday plans. It was supposed to be my year – and the party of the summer – and this wasn’t going to stop me.
On the day of my birthday, it was peak summer in Cassis – a postcard: blue skies, poolside tans, card games at the table, everyone drunk and glowing and a little sunburned. I had been bleeding profusely for two days straight, and 48 hours earlier had endured the most excruciating physical pain of my life – not without the appropriate levels of unavoidable psychological trauma and gutwrenching sobs. I couldn’t swim because of the bleeding, and by that point had told every single one of my 15 friends what was happening. The reactions ranged from awkward silence to vague pity to a kind of half-concerned “oh wow” energy. A couple of close girlfriends checked in quietly. The rest kept their distance, which I didn’t totally blame them for. Honestly, it hadn’t fully sunk in for me either.
And really, it should take a person a moment to grasp something so world-shatteringly real as the possibility of human life in your hands. And this sinking-in certainly wasn’t going to happen while I was consistently slightly buzzed and hosting a large group of adult children. The deed was done and behind me, and all that was left was for me to endure the lingering inconveniences of its aftereffects.As the morning faded into afternoon and I started to think about the lunch menu, my phone vibrated.
It was my boss. The text read: “Dear Alice, as you know we have been doing a lot of restructuring over the past couple of weeks…” I let out a loud nervous laugh that resembled the one I’d let out when I once got mugged while on a Bumble date – a story for another time. These motherfuckers were getting rid of me on my birthday.
If this was my entrance into this new decade, it had already started fraying at the edges. I made a joke of the whole thing, of course – kept it light, stayed on-brand. The chaos didn’t scare me as much as the silence afterwards. I wandered back toward the pool, where one friend was battling the wind to roll a cigarette and another had just spilled some pastis onto a towel no one would clean. I watched them float and burn and laugh and shout about nothing. The music changed. I didn’trecognize the song. Thirty felt like something I hadn’t arrived in yet. But I was there – I was still there.