Good God, what happened to my life?  How did I ever wind up with a sixteen year old? 

 

Tonight was a wake-up call for me.  My sixteen year old passed the permit test and received his ability to “drive” legally, with me or his dad in the car. Good God, what happened to my life?  How did I ever wind up with a sixteen year old?

As I approach my next birthday, no milestone, just jumping over the next hump, I look back and wonder where time went.  I remember being sixteen just yesterday.  And, I think, “have I changed much?”  Of course I have, but how much I wonder.  That year, the year I turned sixteen, was a difficult one for me.  Just before my birthday my cousin committed suicide, and a family friend was in an accident leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.  For a sixteen year old girl, who really had not lived much outside of her picket-fenced world, this was emotionally stressful, and I suffered deep inside.

Carrying the thought of “why does this happen” for that entire year, just waiting for that year to be over, was all I thought about day in and day out.  Death had stared me in the face for the very first time.  Someone died who was young.  Someone would never be the same, and he was young. Could something like this happen to me?  That year lingered on and on, and finally, it came to an end.  Now, looking back, that wasn’t all that happened that year.  I too got my license.  I had great friends, who lived life brilliantly and brightly.  We took risks.  Stupid ones.  But we survived that year.

Today, I hold onto life so carefully.  It’s become something so precious.  Across the last few decades I’ve continued to lose young and old, family and friends, young children stricken with cancers no one can repair.  What I learned by looking back at my sixteenth year, is that yes, life is precious, and at the same time, we must let go of life sometimes, in order to move forward.

Stay healthy, be fit, and have fun!