My Aging Children

I remember the comment my mother made when I complained to her 20 years ago about how old my daughter was: "Yeah, I feel soooo sorry for you," she sneered. "How do you think I (emphasis on I) feel having a daughter as old as YOU are?"

So now that we are twenty years older, I don't dare complain about being the mother of a 40 year old, because I know I'll hear, "How would you feel if you had a daughter who was close to 60?"

Funny thing about age - the older you get, the younger it sounds - on other people. Forty would be fine for me, or even for somebody else, but it sounds ridiculously old on MY daughter.

Was 1969 really so long ago?

The years between then and now may not all have been wonderful, but many moments were filled with wonder. 1969 truly was an amazing year. It was the first year the Academy Awards were telecast around the world. Richard Nixon was still president. The Viet Nam war was raging on. The day before my birthday and five days after giving birth to Keeley, on the 20^th day of July in 1969, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr., landed on the moon, fulfilling President John F. Kennedy's dream of landing on the moon before the end of the 1960's.

Robert F. Kennedy never knew his brother's dream was realized. He and Martin Luther King, Jr. had died the year before. The stage was set for upset.

The Beatles performed for the last time in 1969. For me, a Beatles fan who attended one of their concerts and owned almost every album they ever released, it was the end of an era.

Top songs of the year included, Get Back by The Beatles, Honky Tonk Woman by The Rolling Stones, In the Year 2525 by Zager & Evans, Sugar Sugar by the Archies, and Suspicious Minds by Elvis Presley. The song of the year went to Simon and Garfunkel for Mrs. Robinson.

Popular movies included, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and True Grit.

1969 was the year Judy Garland died and Gwen Stefani was born.

The month after I graduated from high school, I gave birth to my oldest daughter. The following month Charles Manson became infamous for building a family of killers. Like everybody else, those events impacted me profoundly, but Sharon Tate (a Manson victim), and I had been pregnant at the same time that year, so I was emotionally invested as well. Did all of those events really take place forty years ago?

My youngest daughter, Brittney, who turned 25 this past April, tells me about how quickly the summer is going by. "I know," I agree, "by the time Keeley's birthday comes around, the summer is half over."

Half over - I think about that sometimes - about how I will be 58 in less than a week and, unless I live to be 116, my life is probably way past half over - about how all the things I've wanted to do in my life are only partially completed and I have less than half my time to complete them.

And now my oldest daughter is nearing her own halfway mark.

I remember when all of my children were small. Half was a big word to them. "I'm five and a HALF; I'm twelve and a HALF." And when I turned fifty, Mom reminded me that I was HALF a century. She had previously called me the year I became twenty-five, reminding me that I was a QUARTER of a century. And now my youngest daughter is where I was all those many years ago.

My son, Greg, has been gone from me for over a QUARTER of his life already, devoting his life to his family and to our United States family as a U.S. Marine.

Is my mom, who is 75 now, thinking again in terms of quarters instead of halves? Terms like, "time flies by," and "it's only a matter of time" play in my ear.

Forty years ago today in a hospital in one of the south suburbs of Chicago, I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. In the fly-by years since then, I gave birth to three more beautiful children. And from them I have been blessed with ten grandchildren and two great grandchildren. I wonder sometimes if I've made a difference to anybody, and then Lindsey, my second oldest daughter reminds me that I was her first home, and I think, yes, I have made a difference.

Today my oldest baby is probably experiencing her own aging issues and realizing that life is bitter, life is sweet, and life is short. But life is also blessed - with wonders.