on aging

So...I have a relatively significant birthday approaching in a week, which I am NOT excited about. But in my family, landmark birthdays happen in threes--my mom, my dad and I are usually at "important" birthdays in the same year.

My mom's was the big one this year, though, far eclipsing my own. She turned sixty on Sunday. Is it just me, or does sixty sound significantly older than fifty-nine? I mean, other people's moms turn sixty....grandmas turn sixty....not my mom, right? No, apparently she is sixty.

And really, my mom is so cute. But I notice more and more the wearing of age....around her face, on her hands, which have started to get age spots, and in the increasing softness of her skin.

It's funny how the older I get, the more I appreciate my mom and the life she has lived. I was having a discussion about destiny and fulfilling destiny and finding destiny this morning, and the more I think about it, the more I feel like my mom really has found and fulfilled her destiny. She went to nursing school in Newfoundland, joined a mission organization that worked out of Kenya, did her midwifery training in Edinburgh, Scotland, and worked in rural Kenya for about five years before meeting my dad, getting married, and settling into family life.

And I admire that.

Not just because she has a million great stories about living in Kenya....involving delivering babies in huts, being atop her Land Rover on safari and having lions circling on the ground below, or having a herd of elephants cross the road in front of her....but because she has lived. She has lived a bold and reckless and dangerous life, not just abroad, but in the context of her family as well.

I think more than anyone else in my life, my mother has taught me what unconditional love means. And commitment. And unrelenting patience. And I hope that I can age as gracefully as she has....and love life the way she does....and look hardship in the eye and steel myself against it, knowing that it is but a pothole in my road of destiny.

Do you ever think about what you are destined for?

I believe we are all destined for something....very rarely is it the greatness that the world values so much, it is found more often in the little things that make up a life--
feeding the ducks,
looking at spiderwebs,
swimming in the Great Lakes,
having a picnic,
sharing a memory,
a smile,
a laugh,
a tear,
and saying I love you.

This is my mom.