Yesterday, I was shopping at one of those little gift shops that mostly only sells soaps and and jewelry you can’t imagine wearing, when a woman came up to me and said the thing that I strangers have been saying to me most often lately:

Illustrations by the author.

Whoops, I should have mentioned that I had my 9-month-old daughter T strapped on, and her “little legs” (which are, I’ll admit, awesomely juicy) were kicking around. T has been sick for two weeks now. She has been to Urgent Care where they declared she didn’t have COVID but did have an ear infection — both things I already knew. Now she’s on antibiotics, but her discomfort continues to break my heart — and hamper my ability to get anything at all done.

The thing is, I’m TRYING to enjoy these days. I’m trying to be as present as possible, acutely aware that I’m going to blink my eyes and all of a sudden T is going to be driving off in her Camaro to get something pierced. (My teen references are from the 1990s, and I’m OK with that because I think the ’90s are cool again.) Every time someone says, “Enjoy these days; soon it will be too late,” I get the ominous sense that I’m doing something wrong, that if I was truly enjoying the days the way I was supposed to (in order to avoid the inevitable too-lateness), people would be able to tell and would stop lecturing me about it.

It reminds me of what it was like to be a child. Child Sophie was sad a lot, and the adult response to this was quite often a variation on, “Enjoy these days; soon you’ll be a grown-up and have REAL problems.” This response absolutely shook me. I distinctly remember being 11 in a restaurant with a 10-and-under kids’ menu and having a full on MELTDOWN over it. My thought was:

I had a similar meltdown (but maybe more severe, because it was ALL DAY LONG) on my twenty-first birthday. I remember that as I looked back on my life, I saw that I had really not accomplished any of the things I had intended on accomplishing by 21. I despaired that I’d wasted my youth. I had not done a good enough job at childhood. And now it was all too late, too late, too late. As a birthday gift, my boyfriend gave me a record player shelf he’d built himself. Instead of thanking him, I lamented that this was an adult present, for an adult person, who had things like record players and shelves specifically to put them on. It was as though life was a video game, and I was always one birthday away from the Game Over screen.

Have you ever felt that something was too late? Each milestone comes with an exchange: it’s too late now to feel fireworks for a new person, to wear a bikini in public, to have a baby. The thought that you have squandered an opportunity or maybe made the wrong choice somewhere down the line can feel, if you let yourself think about it too much, like a black hole.

There is probably never an age where you’re not a little worried that you’ll have regrets. And really, there’s no way to know. You wake up every morning, you make the decisions you make, and you experience the consequences. You never get to sit in front of your life and think, “OK, in X number of hours, my life will be happening to me. In the meantime, I have to figure out how to live it.” For better or worse, your life is ALWAYS happening to you. There’s no pause button.

That can seem bleak, and I relate. But there’s respite, too, because those Younger Sophies were, indeed, overreacting. I don’t love the word “overreacting,” as a rule: a reaction is a reaction, and feelings can’t really be wrong. There are reasons we react the way we do, and labeling them as “too much” doesn’t usually make them smaller. So maybe I’ll rephrase it this way: Young Sophie was fooled by the “too late” messaging that other people had been shoveling at her. They weren’t telling her the truth. For most of the things in life that really matter, there is no “too late.”

I want to interject here that the “too late” mentality is very much rooted in capitalism, and it’s worth being aware of that. If you believe in the idea of “too late,” you’re more likely to spend money to get to whatever it is “in time.” If you do an email search for the words “too late,” I’ll bet the majority of what turns up will be promotions from companies urging you to act now so you won’t miss a sale or a hot new product that’s destined to sell out.

As you can see, my Inbox is all corporate when it comes to “too late”s.

Now, obviously, sometimes it is too late for very specific (“specific” being the operative word) things. It can be too late to vote in the 2016 presidential election. It can be too late to make it to a certain party, or class, or seasonal menu. It can be too late to enjoy 12 shots of tequila and have your body metabolize them without a hangover. It can be too late to get pregnant. It can be too late to become a child actor.

But there are workarounds for all of these things. The workarounds might not be exact matches, but they’re not for nothing. There’s a lyric in this Lady Lamb song that I think about when I’m confronted by the fear of “too late.” It comes at the end, in a lovely crescendo: “I want to be alive for the rest of my life.” I repeat that to myself a lot. So long as you’re alive, you can look forward to the great mystery in front of you with curiosity, wonder, and, if you have it in you (even after all the crushing disappointment that can come with being alive so far), hope. You don’t have to, but you can.

Five years after I was given the record shelf as a gift (which, because it was made by a stupid 21-year-old boy who had never made anything else in his life, broke within a month), I went to a toy store and bought myself a Magic Wand Making Kit. I made the magic wand at a picnic table in a park with a playground, and then I swung on the swings. At no point did anyone say, “HALT, YOU! You are a 26-year-old woman! You MAY NOT play with a toy or swing on a swing!” And decades after kids’ menus were rendered personally obsolete, I can still make myself all the grilled cheese sandwiches and tater tots I want. I can even eat COOKIES for dinner (and I have!), because being an adult with an income means having the autonomy to do any fun kid thing you still want to do.

I’m sure that when my daughter is older, there will be things I’ll miss about the baby she is right now. But I hope I can say to myself, “Hey, you really enjoyed those things while you were experiencing them. You were as present as you could be. You had wonderful experiences, and now you get to hold them as part of your fabric.” I hope that will feel like enough.

So, back to the woman in the gift shop. Like I said, she told me, “…I wish I could squeeze those little legs, but it’s too late for me now. So you enjoy it while you can.”

And I looked at her, and said, “She loves to have her legs squeezed. Do you want to squeeze her legs?”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“You could, if you wanted! I can tell that she’s giving her consent. It’s up to you.”

She came up to T and looked at her in her eyes, and then gently squeezed her legs. T DOES love that, and she giggled and kicked and was basically all about it. Honestly, it was a relief to have someone talking to and playing with her at the store; it kept her occupied and interested. And for me, that has generally been true about having a baby: I’ll take all the help I can get. If anyone needed an hour with a baby, I would be happy to give it to them. Your own baby is really cool, but so is your baby niece, nephew, or nibling. We can share.

So I’m filing that away for twenty years from now, when I miss these days. I’ll just have to find someone with a new baby who could use an hour or two for themselves. I have no doubt that that person will exist.

It’s not the same, but it’s something. It’s deciding to stay alive, for the rest of my life.

Here’s a “to do, over and over and over again list” for you. I think if you repeat this particular list to infinity, you’ll feel fulfilled enough to not spend any of your precious and important energy lamenting that it’s too late for you to do anything.