Long After the Thrill

                                        
I've been feeling weird lately and I haven't been able to put my finger on it. It is this time of year, I guess. The end of another school year. In 10 days I will have a 4th grader and 2nd grader. The girls both have birthdays within the next 8 weeks. They are getting sooooo big! I will celebrate my 11th wedding anniversary next month. That doesn't even seem possible - that 11 years have come and gone already. I had this epiphany tonight that this weird feeling I've been having is the realization that my rites of passages have come and gone. Except for menopause, but that's not something to anticipate. All the good ones have come and gone.

Everyone I know is getting married or having babies. Everyone - friends, my sister, cousins. Babies are just coming out of everywhere. I am so far removed from that stage of my life that I almost feel obsolete. It's just me and my empty womb these days, hanging out. I recall when my children were babies and it almost seems like a life time ago. I can remember the newness of my children so vividly. The way they smelled when they were nuzzled against my chest, the feel of them grasping my fingers, the excitement of them crawling and then walking and then talking. Their first day of school, learning to ride a bike without training wheels, losing their first teeth....Those are all things that have come and gone. We are not new to each other anymore. It never really occurred to me that having children was like marriage until now. The thrill when you first meet, the adventures you have when you start your life together, the trials and the tribulations, the newness that slowly fades and turns into a deep love and admiration. There are those moments when things are new again - the look in the faces of my children after they see me following a long school day, when they master a new skill, when they fall asleep at night and they look like babies again. I hold onto these moments, though fleeting, to fall in love with them again and again.

I felt like I was playing house for many years. I have squeezed so much life into 11 years that at many times it didn't seem real. But finally, just recently, I have realized that I am not playing house anymore. I have been married over a decade, I am done having kids, both of my kids are in grade school, I have life insurance....holy crap! I really am a grown up. How it has taken so long to hit me, I don't know. But that is why I have been feeling weird. I am not anticipating anymore. I was always anticipating something. I feel like things are finally in their place. I feel settled in. I guess my job is to sit back and experience my children's rites of passages with them. I'll just sit back and be obsolete and reminisce about when things were new and pretend I have wisdom or some shit. Because that's what grown ups do.