Lately, I’ve been thinking about getting old. I conducted a Facebook poll to see who else was feeling decrepit, and even though most of my Facebook friends are in their late 30s, quite a few people responded with age-related complaints.

It first began to dawn on me that I wasn’t a spring chicken when I compared my first and second pregnancies. With Boy 1, I gained a pretty enormous amount of weight, but wasn’t really uncomfortable until my last few weeks before giving birth. Boy 2 was a whole different story. I was careful not to pork out as hard as I had last pregnancy, but I still felt like a sausage coming out of its casing. My hamstrings screamed. My shoes chafed; my pinkie toes were red and blistered. Each morning, I woke up, stretched, and my calf muscles went into agonizing cramps. One of my ribs popped in and out audibly whenever I sat up in bed. Dairy caused my intestinal tract to seethe with hatred.

Post-birth, I huffed and puffed on the short, ever so slightly uphill walk from the car to the pediatrician’s office. I made sure to carry water and snacks wherever I went, not to stanch my preschooler’s potential blood-sugar-induced meltdowns, but to prevent my own crashes – I’d started having dizzy spells at the beginning of my pregnancy, and now I was assaulted by gnawing hunger pangs or intense thirsts when I was out and about. Suddenly, everything I ate gave me gas. I had a strange rashy-looking spot on my shin. And God, was I tired.

Sure, being pregnant and giving birth have taken their toll on my body – but I’m also just plain getting older. Let me take a moment to drop some scientific facts on your collective ass. I huff and puff not only because I need to do more exercise, but also because my heart isn’t as resilient as it used to be: the heart of a 20-year-old can pump ten times the amount of blood it needs to keep the body alive, but after age 30, it loses more of this almost-superhuman oomph every year. My lungs haven’t made new alveoli since I was 20; no one’s have, because after that age, the lungs begin losing tissue, and after 30, the rate of air flow through the lungs starts slowly declining. My metabolism also hit its peak at the age of 20, and now I watch in horror as the bag of Kit-Kats I just ate lodges itself firmly on my hips. I don’t have a job right now, which is actually good for my health: white-collar workers begin suffering the ill effects of stress and a sedentary desk-jockey lifestyle when they hit their thirties.

My eyes might be bleary because my three-month-old wakes me up every two hours at night, or it could also be that my ocular tissue is aging, since that process begins at 30. My memory is shot – I have total mom brain – and I’ve heard that the effects of childbirth and childrearing on a woman’s memory may be permanent. No wonder my mom could never find our car in the parking lot when I was growing up.

Gah! This is all slightly depressing. Still, aging body and all, I’d much rather be 37 than 27 or 17. I mean, I’ve seen and done some awesome things. As a Facebook friend put it, I’m older than the Internet! (I’m not certain that this is true. I Googled it, and found that the Internet is not actually sure how old it is, either.) I do know I’m well on my way to polyester-panted decrepitude, though. Behold the incontrovertible evidence: the other day when my kid wouldn’t eat his vegetables, I speared a broccoli floret on my fork, popped it jauntily in my mouth, and uttered words I swore I’d never speak, ever since I first heard them come out of my mother’s mouth: “You’re missing out!”