The Beginning of My Journey

I suppose you could consider 1945 as the year of my beginning my journey through life. It was during the month of May that I entered this world with a vengeance, and have gone full speed ahead ever since.

As a little girl I always oooohed and aaaaahed at all the babies being pushed around in baby carriages; dreaming of the day I would become a mom and have my own babies: Didn’t know I would need a husband until much later. At that young and impressionable age I wasn’t interested in those boring details. Anyway—my goal was to become a lawyer and to have lots of kids. Somewhere along the line I realized I needed a husband, so I met a really nice guy and we were married when I was all of seventeen. Wound up becoming a hairdresser and had lots of kids. At the tender age of twenty-one I became the proud parent of my fourth child…ahhhh the good old days when we married young and had a gaggle of little geese walking behind us.

I managed to survive all the trials and tribulations of raising a total of six precious little darlings with my sanity pretty much intact. I was learning life’s lessons through the joys of motherhood. I felt this experience was preparing me for whatever lay ahead, down the rock strewn road towards my future; after all I was like a child raising children, and a military training camp couldn’t be any harsher than this.

During the early years there were two major surgeries, as well as various and sundry mishaps. One kid gets shoved by another and ends up with a hairline fracture of the hip. One climbs out of a crib and as luck would have it, falls and breaks his collar bone. One falls from a friend’s bunk bed ladder and breaks a leg, and of course there was the usual coughs and sneezes and rashes and earaches and boo boos and splinters and bites from other darling little children, and so on and so forth. Amidst all the chaos, there was fighting over homework, who was controlling the TV, who got to stay up the latest, who got the last cookie, who left the empty ice cream container in the fridge, who stole whose clothes, and on and on and on. Pretty intense training for any life situation if you ask me. Probably could have learned the same lesson from two kids!

The teen years were like every other parent’s nightmare…you feel like you have fallen into an endless pit of despair, wondering aloud and through tears while hiding in the bathroom…where are my children? Where have my little angels gone? Then you realize that a natural phenomenon is transpiring: You find out that their brains start to dissolve at the age of thirteen and starts to take the form intended at around eighteen; hopefully. You also wonder if they ever get smarter or do they just get taller.

Everyone manages to grow up safely, and thankfully with some intelligence, and they leave to make their mark on the world. This one marries this one. That one marries that one. This one chooses this as a career. That one chooses that as a career. The phone rings and the news of the blessed arrival of a little boy or girl is greeted with laughter and tears, and boy are you going to have fun, and ya better sleep while you’re in the hospital, and all the other little pearls of wisdom that can be mustered while listening through a fog of memories and days gone by. You want to scream out: Where does the time go? Where? Did I blink one too many times, causing me to miss something? How did this happen without my seeing it coming? Yet here it is, the circle of life throttling ahead full force. So I have now entered what I thought of as phase two of my life’s journey feeling quite cocky and feisty and ready to kick some butt. Kids? Piece of cake. Need help? Piece of cake. Need advice on this or that? Piece of cake. Yeah…you let them cry a bit…won’t hurt. Yeah, you can put some cereal in the bottle with the formula…won’t hurt. Nope they won’t sleep through the night for awhile and that will hurt. Not to worry, the baby dearest won’t feel a thing.

The time had finally arrived to sit back and watch and enjoy and be able to go home. How sweet it is. Hug a baby, smell the baby fresh scent of a little one, rock them, kiss them, secretly wish it were yours then slapping your own head back to reality, feeling their gentle wispy breath against your neck…what a little angel. I now knew that I was part of a much bigger picture.

In case you are wondering why I am not going into very much detail the reason is this: I am just setting the stage for where I am now and that is what this blog is about. Everything that has led up to this point in my life was supposed to prepare me for whatever comes my way. I had to learn some form of patience considering I raised six little gems of my own. I had to have acquired some inner strength  from dealing with various health issues, some of which required major surgery. I had to have developed some semblance of wisdom, seeing as how I had to resolve so many problems. One of my smartest moves was to tell my kids: When you cut something in half so it can be shared, one gets to cut in half and the other one gets to make first pick. The division could not have been done better by a surgeon. All this left me feeling a tad pompous and self-assured in my knowledge of children, or so I thought, and then my precious little grandson, affectionately known as “Chunky Monkey” was born.