What I Talk About When I Talk About "We are The Choices We Make"

My birthday is in April, and this year I will be turning 25 years old.

Even three, four years ago, I would've thought of a 25 year old woman as "mature" or "confident" or "nuanced." Today, three months shy of my 25th anniversary, I realized how far I am from all of those words I used to associate this age with.

Why? Here's my train of thoughts:

My mother was exactly my age today when she married my father, a good 36 years ago. She was 24, but three months away from her 25th birthday. She had been working for a couple of years, I guess, but had been dating my father for about five years. Nineteen months after that, her first child was born. She was 26 years and four months old.

I was cooking dinner in my kitchen tonight and, looking back at a series of failures I've had in that area of my apartment, I thought to myself, how exactly did women my age do it? I don't even know how to cook rice properly. I don't know how to make eggs the way my mother used to do it. I don't know anything! 

As if I wasn't feeling bad enough, I thought of my friends who are now married with baby--babies, even. They're my age. They got married some time ago, even younger than the age my mom married my dad. They have completely different lives from me now. They hear cries night and day. They carry babies. They have regular sex with their husbands. They post pictures of their small families...

Did I feel a tinge of envy?

Maybe. I'm not sure what to name that feeling. I don't think it was, though.

I guess it was a sense of my mind wandering off to a foreign land, an alternate universe where I am living my friends' lives.

I couldn't help it. I couldn't help but think of what if? Because I know the state that I am in... and I don't think I have ever seen myself being as happy as the pictures they post of them with their babies.

Because if the question is whether I'm ready for that kind of life, I will be sure to answer that there is no way that I am ready for it right now, let alone a few years back.

But what if I made myself ready? Just... what if? Will I ever look as happy as they do in those pictures?