the birthday girl

So, today my first baby is TURNING 30. Actually, in about an hour, she will OFFICIALLY be THIRTY!

Oh, my gosh! How old does that make ME?

Sheesh!!!

The easy answer to that is thirty years older. Thirty years older than the moment, the day, the year that I became a mother! Another reason to say, "Oh, my gosh!" It feels like a lifetime ago, a century ago, even possibly a millenium ago!! (laughing to myself) It feels like a damn, damn long time ago!

Lina is a smart, caring, accomplished lovely young woman. She is a great person. If she weren't my daughter, I would want her as a best friend. She is just that special! I am so, SO, SO PROUD to have her as my daughter as well as feeling oh-so-blessed to have her in my life. What a blessing indeed she is to me!

But indulge me while I continue to focus on me and my perceptions of the passage of time. There's nothing quite like having a child turn thirty to make this parent sit up and take notice. Hey, I really am getting older. It's not just a figment of my imagination. It's not just the media blathering on and on about the graying of the boomers. It really is happening ... and it's really happening to ME!

And ... I do feel older. I feel a little worn down. I don't feel the enthusiasm that I use to feel. I have to work at it a little more. I feel despair more easily. Yeah, sad to say, I do feel some measure of despair at the misguided focus of our world, of our country's leaders, of our culture's emphasis on material things while discounting spiritual and ethical values. Can't people see how superficial, how fleeting, how vain all that is? My life, your life is like a blink, a snap of the fingers, a moment, now here ... and now gone. How important can money and power and the right bunch of clothes be when measured in those nanoseconds of our brief existence here on this earth?

The only thing ... and I mean the only thing that I have found in my fifty-some years of life so far that's worth caring one good goddamn about is people and our connections with them. I really do believe Deepak Chopra (although I don't believe that this was original to him) that our separateness and individuality as people is an illusion. We are truly all connected and one, separated only by the differences of smaller versus bigger distances between atoms and molecules and space. Where I stop and you start is only an illusion with which we indulge ourselves. Really, truly, you and I are connected, separated only by slightly larger spaces between the atoms. Otherwise, we are one and the same.

And, so, my dear sweet little girl, Carolina, who is little still only in my memory and my imagination, I hold you close and carry you close in my heart knowing that we will always be connected, whether it be in the intimate ways that moms and daughters are close or whether it is in that universal connectedness that quantum physics sketches only so sparingly.

Thirty years ago, right now at 10:23 p.m., we were at the hospital, your dad was a champ to have gotten us there in time and you were just about to make your grand appearance to this crazy, wonderful world.

Happy 30th Birthday, Lina!!

I love you!

Mamacita