thankfulness...

Tonight may be a sleepless night...not for the reasons one may think. Yes, I am a new mother and it comes with the territory. However, tonight feels different. It is my husband's birthday and it got me thinking. Nearly forty something years ago I wonder if Gerard's mother felt the same thing I do tonight. Did she look into her newborn's eyes and feel both fearful and fearless. In one moment did she feel she was all grown up and could conquer the world and a split second later feel like curling up into a little ball and hiding in a corner until she was rescued by her father, wishing she were a little girl again?

I see the world completely different now. Did I really think that all of this grown up stuff- buying a new home, getting married, having children was all that it was cracked up to be? Now that I am here, I travel back and forth through time into the past, present and future. In the past, I am a vulnerable but spunky child to my parents, in the present I am a new and excited mother to Fischer and in the future I am a wise and seasoned grandmother. Though I cannot wait for my son's life to unfold, there is a huge part of me that yearns for time to stand still, for right now I have everything I need. A loving husband whose gaze I catch from across a room and get instant butterflies, parents who are still young enough to run circles around me and old enough to know better, a sister who is in her thirties and is coming into her own, a feisty grandmother who I can sit with for endless hours and laugh about her past romances and a son who is so new that his skin has no signs of sun damage or laugh lines yet.

Life is more complicated than we like to admit. We always want to speed things up and get to the good parts- to speed up dating and get a ring on our finger, to hurry up and pay our mortgages off, to finally have enough money to buy the car we always wanted and to have our parents get off our backs. Today I would wish for a thousand more dates with Gerard as my boyfriend, an apartment with a good landlord, a beat up jeep that I could pack a dozen girlfriends in with a really good stereo and a lecturing parent saying "be sure to pay your student loan on time and drive carefully".

There are no regrets- if I could sum it all up I would say... a part of me wants to freeze time and still be wet behind the ears. I want to play in mud puddles and dance in the rain until I hear my mother calling me home. I wish I could have known back then what was in store for me as a wife and mother because I wouldn't have wasted all of those tears on past boyfriends knowing Gerard & Fischer were just around the corner.

Our blessings in life are so plentiful if we just pay attention to them and savor the moment. If anyone has any weird or wonderful advice on how to put this all into perspective, I am all ears. Bye for now and good night. Sleep tight and don't let the bed bugs bite.