What'cha Gonna Be When You Grow Up

Some days I try to figure out if I have finished growing up yet. It is hard to be achieve, achieve girl. What the heck, who the heck is that, you ask? First born sure. Parents who believe life can be perfected. Parents who raise you believing anything is possible, and by the way, get going and accomplish it, would ya. I've blogged before about all the blessings in my life - and I'm holding to that. But... in the grand checklist of lifelong to do's, what remains?

Days like this I feel like I have entered that zone where you are in-between stops, in-between goals. Something is coming. Change of some sort. I'm cocooning myself for something that lies ahead. The problem is I just don't know what that is. All I know is I feel like something is unfinished.

Maybe it is just a transition time. Our kids are shifting into an older stage of independence. Far from leaving us, but ready and able to play outside with friends without me hovering and stay up late watching movies on the weekends without me hounding them. My husband has told me I am far too young for a mid-life crisis - so that can't be it ;)

I always grew up knowing what would come next. I knew the goal I was heading out to achieve and did just that to the best of my ability. College, teaching, marriage, kids, house. I've even passed the 20 year high school reunion life marker. I was recently reading a book from my mom, Robert Fulghum's From Beginning to End - The Rituals of Our Lives and in it the author specifically addresses the power of high school reunions.

I was one who didn't go. I thought about it. I connected with a good friend that the reunion invitation reminded me of and then googled a few names. Robert Fulghum writes of how the reunion process - whether participated in publically, or simply visited privately in reflection - is all a very necessary part of life. I found it reassuring that there must be others that only experience reunions through personal reflection. I didn't take the time to dig out my high school yearbook like I had at the 10 year mark. Those that are vivid in my memory don't need me to gaze at their yearbook picture for me to remember how important they were to me. I wonder where they are and wonder if they ever think about me. One in particular I remember wrote a message in my yearbook a year after I graduated because at the time I did graduate he couldn't think of something significant enough to write in exactly then. All he wrote was a simple "Let's see where we are 10 years from now." Ironically. as in all yearbook sentiments, that never happened.

He told me he knew I would make a great teacher. He knew it was in my heart to live and breathe teaching and kids and small towns. He could see me being happy in the same place 10 years from now and that would be enough for me. I can't say he was all that right on all accounts. But he did know one thing - I would be happy and I would live and breathe teaching - if not directly, indirectly through my husband and the aspects of my career that touch teaching. He promised me that day he would go on to be famous and I remember laughing saying if that is the case, I need to have him promise he'll come back and visit my students so they believe me that I really did know a rock n' roll man. I found a clip on YouTube where he drums for Dick Dale. He has gone on to other successes with his own bands - but this is the one moment I remember reading about in the newspaper, seeing his name in print, and knowing he had made it.

Cheers drummer man. The years have treated us both well. What does all this have to do wtih SL? Really nothing. Just the connection I suppose I make to music in my SLife. And the connection to resilience. To get this far in life - on any path - requires resilience.