This is going to be a little bit of stream of consciousness, so please bear with me.

I am getting to the age where I can look back on life, my life, and take lessons from them. One of the lessons is something that was always told to me, but now I feel like I see it take fruit, and that is that there are always good things coming.

Actually, I don’t know if that was a lesson, but I think that would be a lesson that I would impart, in my golden years. Not that I’m in my Golden Years, yet. 🙂

When Wee One (WO) was born, a friend of mine from high school was talking about parenting, and she said “there is always something to look forward to, about every age.“ And I’ve always thought about that as WO has grown up. I loved her being two, I loved her being three, I loved her being five, I loved seven, and now I am loving eight. We are almost done with summer vacation, and tonight before bed, we were giggling about gross almost 3rd grade jokes: (Guess what? Chicken butt. Guess who? Chicken poo.) Silly things, and we were casually snuggling the whole time.

I remember reading these guilt-inducing this pieces about, ‘you only get 18 summers with your children, so do everything.’ So here I’m at the end of my with summer. Already. (And it’s been full and fun and I kind of wish I had planned a little bit more, so then maybe it would have felt more rich. Guilt guilt guilt. But it was still really busy and really awesome.)

I have since seen other memes and articles that answer back: you actually have 18 summers to build a wonderful relationship with a future adult, which will also be awesome, in its way. It reminded me of what my friend told me when we won was a baby. Because she was right. I have loved every age. There has always been something awesome that’s going on.

So I reflected on other times in my life, like marching band or couch surfing or the grad school class in Cuernavaca, Mexico. At those moments, they felt like the pinnacle. Movies often portray adventures like this as the pinnacle: like it’s the best thing ever and nothing else will be as good. I finally have enough time behind me to realize that’s not true. So even if she grows and all this changes, there’s gonna be something else. Awesome to look forward to or rather, there’s going to be something else awesome to enjoy.

(Or TLDR: I finally realize movies are full of shit?)

Those are my thoughts this humid mid August night.

Edit to add: I’m still sad she’s going into 3rd grade. Her elementary school years tip over this year.

Continue reading “The Next Awesome Thing (Also-Movies Are Fiction)” →