Tommy: embracing life 30 years ago!
I was 22 when my oldest son Tom was born. I had always wanted to be a mother, and didn’t have any idea of how young I really was. I was also completely overwhelmed by the responsibility of 24/7 care of another person. I remember one day saying to my mother, “I didn’t know that it was possible to love someone this much, and someday, he is going to leave home!” At which point I broke into tears. My mother just smiled and said, “I know honey, but that is a long way off. Why don’t you go take a nap.”
When I see young mothers now, rushing around like I did, feeling that huge pull of all the other “important” things that need to be done, I feel like saying, “Slow down. There is nothing more important than being with that little guy who will, before you know it, be grown and gone.” But I can still find myself living in the future (or the past)…thinking that true fulfillment will happen at some later point in time, or that I somehow messed up the past irreparably.
Today is a day to celebrate. And in 2 days, when I will be, for the first time in many years, spending Tom’s birthday with him, it will be a day to celebrate too. It is time to love who we are right now, who is here, who is not, and know that this moment, right now, is as perfect as life can be. No future or past moment will be greater. All of life is now.
“Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.” Anne Morrow Lindbergh
