... and here I am.
People who want their blog to succeed usually do not leave off posting for thirteen years, but then again success is, as time passes, constantly being redefined.
Since I last looked at my li'l beginner blog, I completed six more years of NaNoWriMo, Band Mom'd my two kids successfully through High School to graduation, completed a bachelor's degree, followed by a master's degree, found fulfilling full-time work, and - just recently - helped my two kids leave their childhood home for their first adult home.
I've put the last thirteen years to good use.
Looking back at the person I was thirteen years ago, at the issues I was grappling with, and the themes that ran through my posts I am struck by one powerful thought:
No matter how grown up or wise or old you think you are, you're never as grown up or wise or OLD as you think you are *at the time* you're thinking it.
No doubt I will find this post five or ten or thirteen years from now and I will think the same thing I am thinking now while revisiting old posts:
"Wow. I did not know HALF of what I thought I knew."
Experiencing the inevitable separation anxiety in the wake of a (mostly!) empty nest, I find myself philosophical. From the start I began collecting treasures to pass on to these two people I raised from their first quickenings; indispensable wisdom gathered from stitching together a life of patchwork scraps bequeathed on them like a beloved old quilt...
But society made a profound shift from when I was desperately figuring out "adulting." And the creative tools I used to craft my life are useless against the shiny machinery they use to construct theirs. Even the characteristics of the relationships I cobbled together are foreign and nearly unrecognizable as relationships to them.
The artists of their music are a mystery, the actors in their movies unfamiliar, and their streamed "series's"are largely unfathomable. They speak a social language I increasingly do not know, a tongue with recognizable words - minus the generational slang - but with changed definitions.
Our family of four have one shared language we speak amongst ourselves, and our kids have a shared language with this society of which I - until recently - thought I was a part. Lately I find I may have been mistaken.
Because our two kids speak both languages, thankfully, they interpret when words with changed meaning come up in conversation so I am not left a fool thinking these words mean one thing when they mean something entirely or partially or subtly different.
This is a stage, I tell myself, that I must pass through on the way to New Normal. The same way I held on through Covid when the quarantine for those of us who caught it first was fifteen days - half a month! - and this introvert thought she would lose her everlovin mind.
Soon, I tell myself, this phantom-limb feeling will pass, and I will rediscover my old man, and the contours of our too brief couple-hood unencumbered by the rigors of parent-hood. And before I know it, I will realize I am comfortably living the next, cherished stage...
This is not only an ending, I tell myself, but a fresh beginning for two young people whose beginning was delayed by a world-wide pandemic. Yes, I say, it is an ending too but life is a series of endings preparing us gently for that final long good-bye...
We have heard that change is the only constant. I thought I knew that. But some things you must learn and keep on learning.
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