Blog-Schmog................what am I getting myself into? How bad can it be, right? BAD!! On the positive side, I can watch myself grow and flourish, (or sink and rot). My daugher is blogging, and it is entertaining, it is poignant, and it is truly a peephole into that clever brain of hers. As long as we are talking about daughters, and I have 3, they are amazing. Sometimes monsters, sometimes friends, sometimes dark portals into our own vanishing youthful years. I alternate between crying for them, for the hurts that have come into their lives through the years, shaping them into who they are now, and cheering them on, hoping the insight they have gained will serve them well, and that one day, when they arrive at old age, (hopefully out of breath and with a gleam in their eye), they won't look back with regrets...won't have long lists in their heads of what they "should" have done, or "could" have done differently.
Mostly what I want for them is to live every moment right now,.............slow it down, and indulge their every sense, feel every summer breeze that lifts the tendrils around their face, smell the grassy summer smells and the spring lilac,......feel the heavenly weight of a little face pressed into their neck.
It is now, at the precipice of 50, that my heart most longs for the opportunity to take things back.....to have a "do-over" in a few things. And I can't go back. I can only go slower (if I can, and that ain't easy around here) and speak to them in a soft whisper to "relax..................enjoy..." These are the things that you can never get back, my darlings. Never again do you have that breathless, flirty , "anything can happen", "it's Friday night" feeling. Before you know it, Friday night is not a night to look forward to with plans for dancing, dining, partying with friends, it's a night to look forward to putting on your sweatpants and not rushing to the laundry room to clean clothes for work the next day.
It is now, when I have so many things to say to the people that I have loved and lost and can't...and worse, it seems with the passing of these people, the people who knew me as young that I no longer EVER was young. It is, as though, I awoke from a dream at 50, my memories of young adulthood ever foggier and far away.