We were in one of those conversations about co-workers that crop up between spouses, those updates of your week that tend to happen on a Saturday when things finally slow down enough that you can both catch your breath. 

“How old is he?” I asked, my brain already doing the mental gymnastics required to figure out someone's age based on their children. “You said he's got a 26-year-old, so he has to be, what, in his 50s? 60s?"

Then I stopped myself mid-calculation.

“Oh my God. What am I saying? We have a 20-year-old!”

There was a beat of silence as we both processed what I'd just said, followed by the kind of laughter that comes from realizing you've just outed yourself as someone who has completely lost track of time.

If his co-worker's daughter is 26, he could be — technically speaking — our age. 

How did this happen?

I'm not sure when I started thinking of myself as someone who is perpetually too young to have adult children, but apparently that's where my brain has parked itself and refuses to budge.

It's the same phenomenon that happens when someone mentions an event from 20 years ago. There's that split second where your brain automatically calculates "right, so that was sometime in the 1980s" before reality comes crashing down.

Twenty years ago was 2006.

I was a mother by then. I had a mortgage. I was worrying about daycare and whether my kid was getting enough vegetables.

The 1980s were more than 40 years ago, which is a sentence I'm going to need a moment to recover from typing.

Somewhere along the way, my internal clock got stuck. The mental image I carry of myself — the age I feel I am when I'm not thinking too hard about it — is frozen somewhere in my late 20s, or maybe my early 30s at most. 

In my mind, I’m at least young enough that having a 26-year-old would be, maybe not impossible, but at least rather scandalous, young enough that adults in their 50s and 60s feel like they belong to a completely different generation. 

But here I am, old enough to have a child in their junior year of college, old enough to remember a time when calling Narrowsburg from Callicoon would cost you extra for a long-distance call, old enough to remember when 914 turned over to 845. 

The math doesn't lie, even if my brain refuses to believe it.