I had a sobering realization my first week being 40.  I wasn’t entirely sure of the sex of all the Kardashian-Jenner children.  Or, rather, I should admit that there was one I assumed was a boy based on the name, and then discovered was a girl, and… well… the whole thing made me realize that I’m doing a terrible job keeping track of the Kardashian family.  You could even say that I can’t keep up with them.  I am not keeping up with the Kardashians.

This made me feel very old.  Like walking corpse old.

I told Josh that we need to keep on top of this.  We need to start watching more reality television.  We need to know what the kids are talking about, and no, they’re not talking about Wicked Tuna so those are wasted viewing hours.  We need to put our precious viewing minutes into things like Teen Mom and I Want to Marry Harry and one of those Real Housewives shows.

I feel like I’m pretty solid with good television.  We started Silicon Valley, which is really funny.  We’re watching In the Flesh because… you know… zombies.  And I’m super excited about seeing A to Z this fall, which sounds a little bit like a 500 Days of Summer-like show.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I need to up my bad television watching minutes this summer.  I’d like to know how to use them in the best way possible to keep up with Kardashian-like entities.  So if you have any recommendations for bad television, I would like to party my eyebrows off like the Rich Kids of Beverly Hills.

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Time for your weekly nag:

Tip of the week: Find an email client that will allow you to see emails while offline.  The reason?  You can use this email client as a space to back up your email.  Lifehacker had an article this week about email clients for Mac, though some, such as Outlook, also work on non-Mac computers.  Try Googling email client, work offline; a bunch come up.

This is just your friendly nudge to do your weekly backup.  I know, I know, who has the time to create backups on a weekly basis?  No one.  But you still need to do it and forgo ten minutes of something else, once a week.  Right now, before you do anything else, use this post to roll through a quick backup of your email, documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices.  Reading the Roundup on the go and don’t have the ability to do your backup right now?  Email yourself a copy of the Roundup so that the email will serve as a visual reminder to get this task done.  Ten minutes of your time once a week may save you a major loss of time and data down the road.  Don’t have regrets.  So, on your marks, get set, back up!

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “#YesAllWomen” (Stupid Stork)
• “A Month Out” (My Scar Smiles at Me)
• “Why Does She Get Two?” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “An Open Letter to the Baby Loss Community” (CarlyMarie Project Heal)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Infertility Voice has a post about the embryos being stored at her clinic and making the decision on what will become of them.  It’s not as simple as sticking to the ideas they had back when they started down this road.  They now also have information from their pregnancy to consider and maternal health — two factors that they couldn’t have known when they created and stored the embryos.  It’s an interesting look on this idea of making decisions before you know all the information, and how we make choices after the fact.

Inconceivable! often slays me with her gorgeous writing.  This week, she had a post about life after loss.  She writes of the figurative shoreline: “In the life I live in front of other people, I am fine. I get up each morning. I bathe, brush my teeth, arrange my hair. I laugh. I talk with people. I go to work. I’m a normal, functioning adult.  But when, inevitably, I find myself in the quiet spaces between the motions, I’m there on that lonely stretch of sand.”  I cannot do this post justice; especially when she melds life after loss with the idea of those first immigrants.  This post made me hold my breath.

Darling Propaganda, IVFer and sex worker, has an eye-opening post on #YesAllWomen which brings into play the hazards of her job.  But it’s also a thought I’ve heard echoed many times since the hashtag started making the rounds: that talking about it is just as hard as living it.  That sometimes it’s just as difficult to sit with all of those stories and think about them as it is to walk down a deserted street alone at night.  It’s a thought-provoking post.

There were a few controversies in the community this week, one of which is referenced in one of the second helping posts above.  But I really loved the post on  Today’s the Day! about the quality of our comments and the moderate button.  It brings into question who owns the comment box — the blog writer or the blog reader?  Is there an unspoken, loose contract between reader and writer, where both get to speak their mind as long as they’re being respectful?  If you’re going to have a comment box, should you have to accept all comments that fit your commenting guideline?  It’s an interesting conversation, especially since it took days for her comment to finally appear on the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: I would like to keep up with the Kardashians and welcome your television recommendations.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 30th and June 6th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

The ChickieNob and I were having an interesting conversation yesterday about how to choose a college.  The Wolvog has already chosen where he wants to go and will not be swayed from his decision.  In fact, he is so positive about his decision that when he finds a computer engineer or programmer who went to said school, he writes them a fan letter.  You know, as one future alumni to another.  The boy knows what he wants.

Whereas the girl child has some inkling of where she’d like to go but is open to thinking about all schools equally.  Sometimes she wants to go where we went.  Sometimes she wants something completely new.  Location seems to matter above all.

This time the talk turned to the fact that sometimes people choose a school because it matches their personality.  Free spirits may choose Hampshire, where there are evaluations instead of grades.  Some women want an all-woman school like Smith.  Some people are drawn to Big Ten schools.  While there are some people who can thrive wherever they go, I think we can all agree that the type of person who would be drawn to Oberlin is very different from the type of person who would be drawn to Notre Dame.

I think that blew her little mind; the idea of figuring out what sort of person you are and then matching the school to fit your core being.

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I recently took a poll on PBS which asked me to put in order of most important to least important eleven values for raising a child.  By the way, the survey took into account both people parenting and people not parenting.

Click on the picture below to go to the site and take the poll yourself.

I discovered that I’m most closely aligned with Swedish values.  Go Sweden!  I could also live in Australia.  I could not live well while parenting in Yemen or Ghana.  The site also gave you the ability to see how your best value country measured up against where you currently live:

But it begged the question: while this is obviously interesting if you’re willing to pick up and move to a place where the culture matches your personality or core values, what do you do with this information if you aren’t inclined or able to move?  It’s sort of like being told that you have to go to Notre Dame when you have your heart set on Oberlin.  What do you do when your personality or core values don’t match up with the people around you?

And this problem, of course, extends beyond parenting.  A lot of times, we live in an area that doesn’t match us at all.  We’re country folk shoved into cities.  Or we’re free spirits caught inside restrictive regimes.  Or all we want to do is dance, but we live in a town that doesn’t allow us to dance.

What do we do then?

It’s an interesting question: how much does where you live fit with who you are?  Has that changed at all over time, or have you just always made yourself fit your space?

Thank you.

I had intended to write everyone back and thank them for their birthday wishes, and then life happened.  I accept that I’m not getting to it by the end of the week when I look at everything else on my plate, so I’m writing an impersonal thank you instead.

Thank you.

Thank you for making a stressful time a little easier.  It’s just a birthday wish, but it’s something so much more than a birthday wish, sort of like one of those confusing math problems where one plus one adds up to more than two.  I feel as if that must happen sometimes in calculus.  I should add that I’ve never taken calculus.

This has been a hard winter and a hard spring, and couple that with a fear of growing old and a strong sense of my own mortality (as well as the ability to freak myself the fuck out about my mortality) as well as general end-of-the-year weepiness, and I managed to make myself physically sick over the idea of turning 40.  Physically sick for days.  I like to think of that as one of my hidden talents along with mastery of the Irish penny whistle and an ability to replicate all of the voices on the London recording of Les Misérables.

By Monday night, my body was starting to surrender to the fact that it was aging, that Little League baseball was ending, that the school year was wrapping up, that we’re in a period of upheaval and I’m going to have to live at this level of anxiety for an indefinite period of time.  And I started quietly to say to myself, “okay.”

Okay.

It’s a little word of acceptance.  It’s an acknowledgment.  Perhaps now is not a time when I feel ecstatically happy and settled.  And that is fine.  There is always the option to pause in okay; for not reaching beyond okay but stopping here and nodding.  This is where I’m at right now.  Okayness.

And that’s okay.

I love this blog and I love Facebook because your birthday becomes this great reminder of all the people out there who are surrounding you in your okayness.  Sometimes social media can make you feel a little bit more alone than you actually are.  It has the ability to isolate; to make you feel as if you’re looking in a funhouse mirror where all the images you’re seeing are taller or thinner (or simply better) than what you gaze upon when you look down at your own reality.  Seeing things as a reflection rather than head-on can sometimes do that.  Social media has the ability to make us feel left out or disconnected or not heard.

And then you have a day like your birthday, when all these random people from various parts of your life come out of the woodwork to say two words: happy birthday.  And with those two words, they remind you that there is also so much good in social media.  It makes us feel included, connected, heard.

So thank you for helping carry me over that line; not just the actual line between 39 and 40, but that much greyer line that delineates okayness.  Thank you for bringing me over to the better side of that, when okay signals an accepting sigh vs. the hiss of reluctant settlement.

Onward.

Well.

It happened.

I turned forty.

And I’m not writing in all-caps (though the day is still early).  I haven’t changed my font to a lurid pink.  And while the week is young, I don’t think I’ll rename the Roundup “The Encircling.”

We spent the weekend at the beach.  We didn’t go to our usual beach.  Instead, we traveled to Rehoboth where I went as a kid.

One time when I was little, my father took my sister and I to the beach while my mother stayed home with my baby brother.  He took us to Funland, an amusement park on the boardwalk, and I wanted to do the teacup ride.  But seconds after the ride started, I realized that it didn’t feel like the one at Disney World.  It was moving too quickly, in tight, nausea-inducing circles, and I started to scream.  My dad got the operator to stop the ride, and then he jumped onto the floor before the ride had completely stopped to scoop me out of the teacup.  My father made me feel so safe, knowing that he was always just a few feet away, able to convince a ride operator to stop the teacups for his daughter.

I felt pretty scared about turning forty.  I wanted to be somewhere I had once felt safe.

We sat on the beach and read books.  The Wolvog lovingly recited his favourite hexadecimal codes as we stared at the water as if he was reading poetry.  We ate French fries and waved away seagulls.  At night we went to that boardwalk amusement park after dinner.  The ChickieNob and I rode the haunted mansion ride and screamed.  The kids and I squeezed ourselves into one cramped car of the ferris wheel.  And we ended the trip by riding the merry-go-round.

I have a personal policy of never walking by a merry-go-round, and I have a bit of a talent of sniffing out random merry-go-rounds.  I even found one tucked into a random courtyard by walking down an alleyway in Rome.  There was a merry-go-round outside my art school, and I rode it almost every day because I figured I may not remember the etching techniques that my instructor was trying to teach me, but I would always remember riding the merry-go-round.  And I do.  So we finished the night with a last ride on the merry-go-round, and I watched the amusement park and beach blur around me, as if I were spin art splattering all these memories from so many beach vacations on a figurative canvas that I could hang up to remember the first half of my life.

We drove home at night, eating fudge in the car and singing along to Les Misérables, so I could be here to step into middle aged.

So now I am forty.  Now I am middle aged.  I’m trying to be okay with that.

This is the last post I’ll write in my thirties.

All eight years of blogging have been in my thirties.  I started this blog a little after my 32nd birthday.  The twins were not yet two.

When I started this blog, I had no idea that eight years down the road, I would still be writing it on a daily basis.  I wasn’t the most confident writer.  Actually, I’m still not the most confident writer, but I know my voice better.  Yes, I can say that.  I know my voice better.  I know what sort of topics I can write about and which ones I can’t do justice.  I’m still nervous before I hit publish sometimes, but overall, I am more comfortable in my writing skin on the other end of thirty.

All my niches on the Internet were carved out in my thirties.  I joined Twitter and Facebook.  I started writing for BlogHer.

I was massively pregnant when I left my twenties and entered my thirties.  I gave birth to the twins that summer.  I left my teaching job soon after that.  And now I am leaving my thirties with two almost-ten-year-olds and four published books on my bookshelf.

My thirties were amazing, mostly because I had finally reached this huge goal that I had spent most of my twenties trying to reach.  I’m sort of ashamed as a feminist to admit that it wasn’t the four books despite getting that MFA.  It’s those two kids.  I wanted to be a mother so badly.  I wanted kids specifically with Josh, but I also just… there was this overwhelming pulse inside my heart that kept throbbing out this message: you want to be a mother you want to be a mother you want to be a mother.

I wanted to be a mother.

And in my thirties, I got to be a mother.  I got to do all of my parenting thus far inside that decade.  Their life began as that decade in my life began, and now we’re moving into a new decade together — their tens and my forties.  They are so amazing.  They are funny and creative and sensitive and cuddly and independent and stubborn and intelligent and they make huge mistakes and they get some things so completely right.  They are messy and wonderful, and we are so lucky to have them in our lives.  To get a front row seat to watching them grow up.

[On a side note, I told the twins that I wrote a paragraph about them since I always give them a heads up and ask permission before I mention them.  The ChickieNob pursed her lips and looked at me owlishly as she said, “you could only come up with one paragraph of things to say about me?”]

When I was little, I watched the show Thirtysomething, and I thought about how thirty was sort of this drab little decade where you weren’t  cool like a twenty-something and you weren’t an adult like a forty-something.  I’m not sure how I overlooked including thirty in adulthood, but it didn’t carry the weight of middle age like forty.  It felt a bit like a balloon, bobbing between the shininess of twenty and the settled feel of forty.  The cast was lovely and talented, but I always felt a little badly for them.  I mean, who thought about their thirties?  It was just a tube of years on the way from this place to that place.

I just walked that tube of years.  And I loved it.

My thirties taught me who I am.  What I can’t change.  What doesn’t really need to be changed.  What I should probably work to change.  I discovered what I like and don’t like and how to say what I need to say emphatically and without apology.  I became more flexible with yoga,  and I became less flexible with compromising my needs to make someone else happy.

And in the end, I grew and I grew and I grew.

Thank you, thirties, for treating me well.  For leaving me in a better place than when I entered.  Thank you for Josh who continues to hold my heart with care and do most of the laundry.  Thank you for the twins who blow my mind on a daily basis.  Thank you for my parents and siblings and siblings-in-law-who-are-really-more-like-siblings, and nieces and nephews.  Thank you for my wonderful friends: the ones that I see in my face-to-face world, the ones I keep in touch with over the phone, and the ones that I email through the computer.  Thank you for my work, for my books, for helping me find my writing voice.  Thank you for our little house.  Thank you, thirties, for being the decade when all of this happened.

May my forties go just as well.

No birthday wishes yet, please.  I want a chance to say goodbye properly before I sigh, close the door, and say hello to the next decade.