The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness. – Unknown Source

I’d like to know who the unknown person was that said that. Because they obviously had never seen Jennifer Beals or Rachel Weisz or Julianne Moore.... or my Aunt Terry! But first things first.

There are people on cell phones all around me (taking pictures with them even), people driving Hummers, people drinking out of Starbucks cups, people using words like, well… blog… and lots and lots of people who basically seem to be taking full advantage of everything that the twenty-first century has to offer. Yet, still, you can’t convince me that I’m not living in a bubble here in southern Colorado where everyone EXCEPT me seems to be moving along at a 1950s pace.

My father is fascinated with something called “time acceleration.” He believes that time is actually running quite a bit faster than it was back when he was growing up in the forties and fifties due to the hastening speed in the earth’s vibrations. He says it’s why there’s never enough time, why we are always tired, why technology develops so quickly, and why days turn into months, turn into years before we freakin’ know it. Well. Maybe. But nobody here got the memo!

Examples of rampant ample time:

A little girl named Raegan is one of the first people to greet me every day. She’s two-and-a-half years old, always wearing non-stained little blouses (note I didn’t say t-shirts!) and non-stained little pants and cute little pigtails with ribbons and sweet little dimples while waiting at the door of the day care to welcome us with a swell “Hi! Good morning!”

You don't see it?? Wait, I have more.

Then there are the soccer girls, Toni’s teammates, who come to the morning games with complex ways of keeping their hair out of their faces. No ponytails. No French braid. No, these are hairstyles that involve illegal-looking clips in the sports world or rubber bands that are so small I, personally, don’t have the skills to operate them, MUCH LESS on a game day… a game day that starts before the temperature rises above freezing.

Still no??

THEN there are the drivers. Drivers that range in age from 15 to 50 to maybe as old as 115. I’d say they make up 80 percent of the driving population. They may be tourists. They may be locals. They may be ET’s second cousins removed, for all I know. But they don’t adhere to speed limits. I do realize that it is a LIMIT. But must we go ten miles below it? Don’t you want to get home like I want to get home? Don’t you want to feed your pets? Eat a sandwich? Get out of the car and stretch??

All the above activities/appearances take time, and everybody seems to have it in spades around here… except poor, pitiful, time-accelerated me.

Now, granted, maybe if I worked here in town I wouldn’t have to get up at 5 am to shower and dress before attempting to awaken all four of my children and feed them and shuffle them into the car by 7:00 to start the drop-off mission so that I could make it to work by 8:30, maybe then I wouldn’t be in such a god-awful hurry. And maybe if they were all dropped off at the same location, I could save another hour’s time driving through every blessed school zone this town has to offer. And maybe if my wonderful husband wasn’t working in another city, through another three mountain passes, at another elevation in a galaxy far, FARRRR away, I wouldn’t feel the sting of time acceleration so bitterly.

I can see where my face should look petulant and bewildered with unhappiness. But that's all changing. Today. Because I got approved for a part-time schedule! HOORAY!! So maybe now I can comb my children’s hair before dropping them off where they need to be or teach them to smile and say hi like Raegan. We don’t own ribbons, and I threw away all the little rubber band thingies because they were giving me migraines, so I guess complex hairjobs are out.

But hopefully I’ll take full advantage of those extra two hours a day where I can work on my second novel, or do laundry or, let’s get serious here, research at places like http://www.myheritage.com/, to find out what celebrity I look most like. Because it’s all about making the thirty-something happy so that there isn’t any sort of relief map on my face!

When I first graduated from college, I used to be told by small children that I looked like Winona Ryder back in her Beelejuice days.


A few years after that, another child told me that I was the Hispanic Reese Witherspoon. (It’s the chin.)



But now, according to the LOVELY, EXCEPTIONALLY KIND, and quite HUMOROUS “myheritage” resembling-results, I am 75% Katie Holmes, 74% Penelope Cruz, 74% Jessica Alba, 74% JENNIFER BEALS, 73% Choi Ji-woo, 71% RACHEL WEISZ, 71% JULIANNE MOORE, and 68% Robin Wright-Penn. This all adds up to quite a bit more than 100%, but who's counting?

While complimentary, if not delusional, I’ll take it. Although nothing tops the appearance-related compliment I was paid by Emma tonight. We were reading Disney’s Aladdin, and she pointed to Princess Jasmine, looked up and said, “Mommy!”



Which is quite the improvement from last week when she did the exact same thing, but with Elmo's mommy's picture.



So not only do I feel like I’ve joined the Time Slugs R Us club, but I feel especially beautiful. And, while it may not look like it, THIS is the face of a thirty-something who’s happy.