I am stretching myself thin…maybe too thin, I don’t know, we’ll see what the ramifications will be.  It goes along with this time of year, when my instincts tell me to hibernate, like the wise animals.  And it goes along with sleepless nights brought on by insomnia, probably associated with menopause…though no one has yet informed my body of this great transformation, so it keeps perking on, business as usual.

My oldest child, my best friend, my co-conspirator to many adventures, my ally, and my right arm is now a grown woman.  Still living at home, but only with one foot in the door, hair flying, impatient to leap from the threshold into her own world.  Everything she does now, she does fast– dishes, typing, driving, talking– she makes my head spin and I reach out to steady myself…on the arm of my eight year old daughter, who is still the chick beneath my wing, cozy in her little girl world, quiet and content yet with simple things.

I look in the mirror now, and I see many faces before I see my own– my mother, my grandmother, my aunts…can’t be.  They’re all ‘old’ and I’m ‘me’, so that can’t be.  I’m still there; I’m pretty sure.  I just have to look harder now to see the ‘me’ I have always known.