No Backsies.

What I want to say is hard to put into words. Mostly, because I feel like I come off sounding like a pompous philosophy PhD student. (Note: I do not think all philosophy PhD students are pompous. Or useless. At least you are putting money into the higher education economy.) So I have started and deleted a couple times, but I really want to write it, even if it means using three conjunctions in one run-on sentence.

There are moments when I am struck by the permanence of life. I know that mostly poetry and priests will comment on the little time we have here, so sin wonderfully or live like a saint, depending on whether you take the poetry or priest more seriously. But the things I have done, the choice I have made, the things done and the choice made that impact me, will forever be solid events in history. My footprints are not impressions in the sand, disappearing under a wave. They are crushed into granite by the pressure of living. I stop and marvel at that. This is my life, unchangable behind me, nothing but change ahead. It is not what I imagined for myself at fourteen or eighteen when I was going to be a veternarian with a independent practice attached to my house, so I could be home with my two kids I had with my college sweetheart. I was going to be the Dr. Huxtable of the animal kingdom. (Of course that is the way it should be. If your life is what your fourteen-year-old self imagined, I don't know whether to envy or pity you.)

No matter how much I protested it, I really did eventually become a teacher like I was meant to. I live in my hometown willingly, happily, which my twenty-three-year-old self would never believe for any amount of money. I really am that person who adopted a kid days after finding out I was pregnant. I am that person no matter how many times I denied the possibility before it happened. I do drive a minivan. There is no erasing that from my exisitance.

This is my life, no backsies. I'm glad I wouldn't take them anyway.