When I started this blog, I was well ahead of the crest. So many of the big moments were still in some abstract future with no dates or parameters attached. Things have changed a bit, as things do. My precocious big-eyed boy is a 14-year-old genius with the vocabulary and political knowledge and lightly salty pragmatism of someone five times his age. My girl, a literal fetus when I started this blog, is a 9-year-old vessel of joy and enthusiasm, unless you're beating her in a board game. She delights in the mundane, finds excitement around every corner, but still refuses to brush her hair ever or clean her room, which exists in a perpetual state of post-natural-disaster chic.
Steven and I have grown up, too. I went from anxious newbie mom to a veteran of sorts, still anxious and 99.3% sure I'm doing it wrong, "it" being everything from giving advice to deciding what's for dinner. Steven, the rock that stills my wobble, has characteristically entered our latest phase of life more smoothly than I have, with such confidence that it seems he hasn't even noticed we're not 22 anymore, which has the dual effect of a) inspiring and comforting me and b) pissing me off a little bit. (I'm joking, mostly; I only wish his zen were contagious.)
I can't quite pin down when things got so real. When it stopped feeling like we were playing house and started making plans for retirement, for the kids' college education, for a future that, only recently, has begun to seem like it could be made out of sand. Touch it and it crumbles, that's a distinct possibility. Any one of us, at any moment, could suddenly be forced off our predictable, tire-rutted track and onto a new one, maybe not a track at all and more of a brush-choked path in the woods, so overgrown we'll have to push on before we can even begin to see what lies ahead.
Memories aren't sacred.
Bodies aren't loyal.
Time isn't promised.
These are things I've learned over the past however-many years, a slow dawning as I've watched bad things happen to good people and sat by thinking it shouldn't be this way.
But good things happen to good people, too. And I choose to believe they outweigh the bad, even if the bad is all you can see through your fear and heartache.
If falling is inevitable, so is the fact that there are hands ready to catch us when it happens.
So, let's keep going.
