My best friend was in town briefly the other night and we went to her parent’s house to see her.  It’s easily been 6 years since we’ve last been there and these are people I truly do consider my second family—I’ve know them since I was 6 years old so we are going on 34 years of friendship and, yes, sisterhood.  It’s so different to be in the places we were as children, to remember what it felt like to be with our parents, and to realize that we are at the age now that they were when we ran those same halls.  The halls are quieter now, the house showing a little more age and love, and now I have my own child that walks through them.  I remember how much I looked up to the adults in my life, how much I revered them, how much I even feared them at times, and I realize that I am at the exact age they were and I am doing the exact same things they did—making sure we can get by and keep a roof over our heads, making sure my son has the best choices and not wanting to screw him up, to make sure he knows he is loved, to make sure that my relationship with my husband is solid, managing work, home, and my family and friends.  It’s funny how life cycles around us and we find ourselves in the same position without even realizing it.

Time passes so quickly and I’ve had so many moments over the years where I legitimately ached for the feelings I had as a child—that sense of security, that safety, that certainty of being a kid and knowing everything.  Transitioning roles from child to parent and then child to parent caregiver is a heavy thing.  It’s a natural progression, yes, but something we don’t do well to prepare for.  We repeat what we know and model what we are taught so building our own habits can feel so uncertain for us, but the kids around us have no clue that we are literally all winging it.  I used to think my parents and my friend’s parents all had it SO together, that they were the absolute paragon of adulthood and that is what we were meant to strive for.  I wanted to do what they told me to and make them proud.  I wanted to have that same sense of authority in my life.  Going bigger wasn’t really a thing that crossed my mind, and it’s odd how sometimes when we go back to the places that seemed so big to us in childhood, we see how small they were, how much our parents were simply humans trying to get by—just as we are now.

Seeing my parents and my friend’s parents age takes them from this idolized, almost super-human like figure to human.  We are all fallible, fragile, and imperfect, and we all have the same human struggles.  And that is exactly how we are meant to be.  Those walls didn’t hold the paradigm for what life needed to be like—they held the life, love, laughter, anger, fights, parties, and all the crazy energy of what life is.  We are always so quick to want to move away from those homes, to create our own life, and we often don’t appreciate what was in the bones of those homes, the love and the very life-force that sustained it.  At the end of the day the home itself may be nothing but materials put together, but everything contained within it, the energy we created, experienced and left there, leave a mark.  Time passes quickly, yes, but that emotional residue lingers and we are no longer the children.  We have now graduated to the same status, that mythical “adult.”  We see our parents with a new light, a little more understanding, and with more patience, grace, and appreciation.  I still hope I made them proud, but more, I hope I made them feel loved and secure, the same as they did for me.  I wouldn’t be here without my family or my friend’s family either so this goes beyond nostalgia.  This is simply life—precious, fragile, delicate experiences strong enough to carry us through the passage of time.  What a beautiful blessing.