Hope

Today's 100 words:

I've always loved butterflies. Even as a young child, I was content to sit and watch them, inspired by their colorful wings and their seeming delicacy. I hated to find dead ones and would bury them in my sandbox, feeling in my heart that a creature so beautiful deserved not to be stepped on but mourned. As I grew older and learned more about them, butterflies started to represent something else to me--new life and the possibility of change. If a caterpillar could emerge from a cocoon as a new, changed being, then maybe I could too. Butterflies became hope.

Back to the past

Yesterday's 100 words:

I find it fun to speculate on what period in my life I would return to if time travel were possible. I think I'd choose graduate school, as those two years were some of the most tumultuous yet fulfilling ones of my life. They were years of firsts: first apartment, first car, first truly adult relationship, first time I really felt like an independent woman. There are things I would like to change, of course--some of the decisions I made and the paths I took. But overall, those two years were fun years--growing years--and well worth living again.

My hope

Last October, I wrote this 100-word piece about something that I often think about now that I'm a parent: understanding my own parents' choices and learning to make them my own:

I grew up being fearful of new things and resistant to changes. My parents were strict; they didn't allow me to do many of the things my friends were doing, mostly out of a fear that I would get hurt. I admit I felt like an outcast many times. Now that I'm a mother, however, I understand my parents' desperate need to protect me from the unknown. My only hope is that I'm able to protect my children while at the same time giving them enough freedom to experience all the things that will help them become well-rounded adults.

We're going through changes

Tonight I reread some of the emails that my husband and I exchanged after we first met in a chat room in early 2004. I haven't looked at them for about six or seven years, and it was bittersweet to read them. Even though we love each other, it's no longer the same love we shared in those emails; we're not those people anymore. In a lot of ways, I miss who we were back in those days when everything the other said (or wrote) was wonderfully exciting, those days when we counted the hours until we would talk again, when we shared the minutiae of our lives and hung on each other's words, when we finally met and shared that first breathless kiss...

Things have changed now. They have to, I guess, as we evolve, as we grow older, as our circumstances alter and fluctuate--living together, getting married, having children, weathering the ups and downs of day-to-day life. It's a different love now--not better or worse, but different. And I know that our love will continue to evolve as we go through life, as we grow older, as our children leave home to pursue their own dreams and goals, as we settle into a life with only each other to hold on to. I look forward to growing old with my husband, to seeing who we become.

But my heart does ache a bit for those lost days, for those two people who were so much in love.