A (slightly) Earnest Birthday Essay

I turn 39 today. That is a strange thing to type.

Not because 39 feels significant in the way milestone birthdays are supposed to…it’s not a round number, not a clean marker. Strange because I’m not sure I’ve ever written my age on the internet before. Not since I turned 30, anyway.

Growing up, there was a rule- unspoken, but very much spoken: a woman should not share her age. My mother didn’t learn her own mother’s age until my older brother was born- on her mother’s 50th birthday. A whole half-century, kept quiet.

I’ve been thinking about that lately.

So: I am 39.

And I’d like to reflect, just a little.

When I turned 30, my life looked quite different. I was single, living in Los Angeles. I was a working illustrator, but not yet fully confident in it. Not yet fully confident in much, if I’m honest. I had the outlines of a life- the career, loosely. The apartment. The sense that things were assembling themselves in the right direction, if slowly.

Then I got Lucca, my dog, in September 2018. Met my now-husband Danny a few weeks later.

Fast forward a bit: we got engaged in Central Park on Friday, March 13th, 2020. If you need a moment to place that date…take it.

We flew back to Los Angeles a few days later into a world that had rearranged itself overnight.

We got married in Boca Raton, FL that December, streamed to hundreds of people (no guest list cap when it’s virtual). I wore the dress. We said the words. Then- back to reality.

When we returned to Los Angeles, deep in lockdown - newlyweds - we looked at each other and said: we want to be closer to family before we become parents.

So we moved to Miami in August 2021. I was eight months pregnant, in the dead of a Florida summer, during a global pandemic. I do not recommend this particular sequence of events. And yet…

Oliver was born that November.

I became a mother, started over in a new city, launched a wallpaper company (a whole chapter unto itself), and began the long, humbling process of figuring out who I was in this new shape of life.

I made friends. Lost my footing. Found it again.

Bought a house.

Had my second son, Teddy, in 2024.

And somewhere in there- slowly, then all at once- I started to find something that felt like my voice. My actual one.

Ironically, the day I gave birth to Teddy, I also signed my first book deal. Signed, sealed, delivered.

And then - this past January, because apparently I have a pattern - we moved again. To Michigan. My husband’s home state. At 38. Almost 39. Not just closer to family, but among them.

So here we are.

I have moved twice in my late 30s. I have started over more times than I ever expected.

I have a book coming out this September - my first illustrated and authored book, the thing that feels most like me of anything I’ve ever made- and I am releasing it at 39, the final year of a decade.

If you had told my younger self all of this, I would have thought the timeline felt late. That it should have already happened.

And yet - while my career finally feels like it has landed somewhere true, somewhere earned - I simultaneously feel like I am only just beginning. Apparently there is still quite a lot to figure out. I find I don’t mind.

A few less earnest confessions to close: I have never been a voracious reader - I am working on this, slowly, in my own way. I have never been much of a cook. This also remains true, though I’m taking it one dish at a time. I am learning to paint with gouache - equal parts terrifying and exciting. Beginner tips welcome. I am keeping a vocabulary journal, because I have always loved words (A Word and a Thing returns soon) and the feeling of writing them down by hand. And I want to relearn the piano - I quit at nine, which now feels both premature and completely on-brand.

So, here’s to 39.

Not late. Not early.

Just the beginning.

Curiously Yours,

Carly