Transition

At my age, which is not inconsiderable, I can look back over the course of my life and see it divided into 4 distinct sections:

• Childhood - a time of carefree existence when the most pressing issue was that it was raining outside and playing would have to be done inside.  In retrospect, this was such a short and fleeting time!  It is replete with tender and fun memories though.  Kick the can, flashlight tag, riding bikes until dark, snow forts, note passing. Tiger Beat magazine and crushes that lasted 2.2 seconds.
• Teendom - a time of unadulterated angst masked by adolescent bravado that made my parents want to abandon me in a cave.  The thinking was dominated by being popular, wearing Izod (before it was Lacoste), Polo, Jordache and life was marked with everything being a melodrama.  I knew way more than my parents did - I mean they were so totally out of touch.  Einstein's theory of relativity was never so apparent as when I look back on this time.  If felt soooooo long, but was really a blink of an eye.  (Thank God - or my parents would have truly lost their minds and/or fed me to hungry bears!)

• Adulthood - the longest period in my life.  A time when I learned how to pay my bills, succeed at work, develop real and lasting relationships - particularly with my parents - who weren't idiots after all.  In fact, it was during this period that I realized that it was ME that was the idiot.  Whoa!  My adulthood phase lasted just shy of 20 years.  I really got to know who I was, tried to cure or at least educate the idiot within, determined what I liked and what I didn't through a series of trials and readjustments.  By the end of this period, I felt that I knew how to conquer the universe.  As my dad told me repeatedly (having been a veteran of the one period I had not yet entered), I had the theory down.  But practicum, I hadn't touched it yet - not really. 

• Parenthood - BAM!  Ok, so I was still an idiot.  During the 20 year adulthood phase, I not only got to know me - I also spoiled me.  I had no clue what it was like to get up and have other people's needs supersede my own.  But I sure did find out that my inner super type A personality would be going into hyperdrive over the well being of these small helpless beings that I loved more that I had loved anything else - EVER.  My world was irrevocably turned on its ear, putting me for the first time ever in a position of never-ending uncertainty.

I decided to write this blog in order to chronicle this new experience - the highs, the lows, the discoveries and the brick walls.  It will be as much a journal as well as comic (if not karmic) opportunity for my parents to chuckle as I stumble along acquiring the real lessons of the theories I'd thought I'd mastered.