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1.15.2019

ten years

When you're 21, ten years ago you were a child.

At the age of 11,
you probably still climbed trees,
made bowls of mud and grass soup in the yard,
and perhaps even still slept with a favorite doll.

Even at 24, or 27, though mud soup and dolls have probably been laid aside, the person you were ten years ago was still very much a child. There's such a markable difference between the ages; now, your life is full of things that were once dreams, or maybe not even a twinkling in your eye ten years before. You had so much to learn, so much life to do before even grasping the basics.



Between those years and the now, you became an adult.

But at 31, ten years ago you were already an adult. A baby adult taking tentative, shaky steps, but an adult, no less. The great shift has already happened.

To me, the scariest thing about being an adult is how fast the decades go by, having now experienced a full one in grown-up skin -- why is it that when you're a child, a year seems a lifetime away, and now a year is something that seems so close at hand?

It's only a year away.
It'll happen before you know it.
A year.
That's nothing.

Those are things we tell ourselves. I am already mourning how fast will go the decade before me. Will I sit here and write, at the age of 41, that I don't even know where the last ten years have gone?

I started this little blog ten years ago, about a month after learning I was pregnant with my first baby, and the day after my twenty-first birthday. I remember the very day I sat down and wrote the first blog post about how it felt to have life growing inside me. How I never felt alone or even forgot I was pregnant, because it was all I'd thought about from the moment I found out. I remember very distinctly turning over and over in my mind the thought that I felt like "a kid having a kid." And in many ways, I was.

But a month before, when I had still been just 20 years old, I discovered that I was now a mother. I didn't have room to be a kid anymore. From that millisecond on, the decisions I made were no longer full of self, but full of the tiny human my body was creating.

My life was not my own;
I shared it directly,
blood and breath and bone,
with another soul.

Since marriage and pregnancy happened so close together for me as I broke out into adulthood, this blog has in many ways recorded my leaving the cocoon of childhood and my metamorphoses into becoming an adult, wife, and mother, all within a very short amount of time. I made a lot of mistakes.

Twenty-one-year-olds typically think they are very Knowledgeable and have discovered Secrets to Life of which No One Else is Aware. Thirty-one-year-olds know they have so much more to learn than they could ever realize.

What they never tell you is that you'll always feel like the same person. You don't wake up, step into a new day, and become an adult. You wake up and ponder, "I think I am an adult now?" Many times this will happen. And always, with a question mark. One day, it will just stick. Yes, I have made it. Here I am.

My daughter is four.
I have such vivid memories of being four.
Colorful, emotional memories.

My parents trying to convince me to sit on the bridge's railing next to them for a family portrait in front of the Cinderella castle at Disney World, while I absolutely refuse to comply as images of falling into the river below, my parents frantically grasping at my ankles, go through my head.

Wandering in and out of the wooden playground equipment in the fenced-in yard at my preschool, comparing the words "white" and "right" quietly to myself in a whisper, wondering why they sounded the same when I said them, but not when other people said them. (People who could pronounce their Rs.)

Sitting in my yellow plastic bike seat behind my daddy, a clunky helmet Velcroed beneath my chin, watching life and cars zoom past in the golden evening light, on my way to Friendly's to get a clown-faced scoop of ice cream with an M&M smile and upside down cone as a hat.

I am still the little girl in the yellow bike seat. The onion-skin layers of my brain have recorded almost 30 years of memories, and like the well-loved pages of a book, I read them over and over. It is not until I consider the width of the pages, all stacked together, that I realize those memories are 10 years old, 20 years old. And they are well loved; I am lucky.

I'm going to take it you're still the little girl, too.
The little girl under the dappled shade of the big trees at grandma's.
The little girl in the musty back seat of your daddy's car.
The little girl on your grandfather's strong, tall shoulders.

Do you feel the same?



It's always strange, considering time and how it moves. It is water flowing between our fingers. It sounds cliche to say, but I cannot grasp that it has been ten years since my first post on this blog.

I don't even know where the last ten years have gone. But here's to the next ten, and the next. And however many I get. Not everyone gets to live for 31 years. I am grateful. I take them, I will not deny them, and I thank God for them. Happy birthday to me, and to my little blog.


1 comment:

  1. Love this post!!! And that picture of Mimi holding you...wow. She looks so young. I was just thinking, she was about 47 years old. Younger than me today. Time never waits for us; it moves on its own accord. "Seize the moment" might be cliche, but it holds so much wisdom.

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