Seven Months

You came teaching my girl. You came teaching. You turned seven months on May 1st. You grow more beautiful each day. You have spunk and sparkle and you are good at jumping. I was talking to a friend today about how it feels to be a mom...how sometimes- maybe most of the time- you don't quite feel like a person. Caring for others constantly forces you to forget yourself. And I guess that's what I mean by 'don't feel like a person'. You don't have time to stop and just be. But then she said, 'Don't worry. You will feel like a person again someday. Just a different person.' And then it hit me. It hit me how much we change as parents. How someday we will emerge from caring for kids constantly but we'll be better at a lot of things and wiser and older and humbler and better at this thing called love. Man, it's hard sometimes. Loving.

I see now how little I knew about real life back in college- back when everything was a theory...and I was pretty sure I knew everything. Some things, maybe most are things you won't understand until you use your life muscles a little bit and get dirty- get in the trenches. Life is really gritty and really scary and so real. And to go from all theory- all thinking- to all doing, doing, doing is a strange paradigm shift. But jumping into the deep end of marriage and parenthood wasn't so bad.

In this culture I'm young to be married and even younger to have a kid. Remember that place in between worlds in The Magician's Nephew? A forest full of pools leading to other worlds- dying worlds, worlds about to be born. I often feel like I'm there and I belong to more than one world- more than one pool. Everyone my age is discovering themselves- their career- their soul-mate- who they are--- and everyone with children is a decade older than me. So I'm caught in a world where everyone is in a different place and sometimes it feels pretty fragmented. But. Maybe that's the magic of living anyway- that we're all in different pools-different worlds..and somehow, sometimes we meet in the middle--this world--these bodies--this thing we have in common. We're all drifting souls that bump into each other and it all seems random and wild sometimes but sometimes it seems so not.

Like I meet an old man riding a horse on the Fullerton trails and he's telling me how he fought in world war II and how his wife passed away and this is her horse and he soled his because he didn't need two anymore and the jackass bikers always ride too fast and they better slow down 'cause they don't know what a 190 pound horse can do to their rear-ends and just remember to savor every moment of it cause even when you get in little spats it's ok 'cause in the end all you have is each other and you need each other and then when they're gone you miss them sorely and there's nothing like living you're whole life together and thank you so much young lady for your time talking. it sure was nice talking. and he gets this distant look in his eye and I can imagine him sitting by himself at home eating dinner and what it is to be alone. And just like that our lives collide and they mean something in the other's.

Anyway, I'm glad to be here-- changing and colliding with these souls. And this little Winter soul we met seven months ago is especially wonderful. You came teaching my girl. You came teaching.