My baby boy will eighteen. My oldest will be going on thirty-three.
My oldest randomly text-ed me this unnerving question the other day, as she lay poolside in warm and sunny Florida on Spring Break…while I was here on the home front, caring for the little ones and managing the house.
“Have you ever thought how old your gonna be when Chance JUST graduates high school?? Not even college yet!”
I gasped when I first read it…
What on Earth was my beautiful, eighteen year old daughter thinking by asking me this question???
I shared the question on Facebook, only because it was so insane at that moment, I needed some motherly backup…reassuring me that yes indeed my kid was rude and inconsiderate.
How are we to send her off to college in a few months and let her live in the city on her own, when she doesn’t even know one of the basic skills of life...think before you speak…or text.
Later that night, I laughed about it.
Not because I thought it was funny, but because I overreacted.
My daughter was starting to ponder life…the big bad world that lies before her. She was genuinely concerned at how old I may be when my youngest is her current age…maybe because she thought I may be crippled or too fragile by then to help him through his senior prom and graduation.
And help pack up his things and ship him off to college fifteen years from now…
Or maybe even whether I may be alive…maybe she hasn’t yet grasped different stages in life and aging, not realizing that 57 is still pretty young in our world.
When she returns from her mini Spring Break in Florida with her Grandparents, I may have to pull her aside and ask her what provoked such a thought.
Until then, I will take this Forty-something old body that is a little sore at the moment, but healing and getting healthier everyday (all due to my new way of eating and lifestyle so I live to be a hundred), and continue folding mountains of laundry, sort through the explosion of summer clothes that my teenage girls dug through for their last-minute getaway, and wait for my husband to come home from yet another trip to give me a “mommy time-out”…
I am told I will miss these crazy days someday, when all the kiddos have moved on to college/jobs/starting their own lives…
I probably will after my 57 year old body locks the front door, takes my bra off through my sleeve, throws it on the ceiling fan, cracks open a chilled bottle of wine and blasts some Duran Duran like the free spirit I once was…
a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away…
Karma Is A Funny Thing 