Time Passages

         Over the years I have been a mother lion protecting her cubs, feeling their hurts and their slights, their sadness and successes as deeply as my own.  Gradually, painfully, I have started to let go, to allow them to fight their own battles, to make their own choices.  It hasn’t been easy.  As I watch them grow through their adolescent years and beyond I realize how dependent I have become on their need of me and how lost I feel without them.  For nearly twenty years all of my struggles have been to give them happy memories of childhood and somewhere in all of this struggle, I have lost me.  I have forgotten what it means to be anyone except Mommie. 

            When I think about it, I realize that for the past several years, both before and after my divorce from Billy, in the good times and the bad, it has been as if I held my breath . . .waiting . . . .just waiting . . . .but for what?  For something wondrous and magical to life me up, to rescue me, ease my burden, ease the weight of the struggle, to take care of me and change my life into all that I had dreamed it would ever be.  Sadly, I have to face the dawn and remind myself that there are no knights on white horses, no heroes to come and save a dreamer like me. 

            Whoever I am, whatever I have or have not become rests solely on my shoulders.  If fulfillment or contentment have escaped me then perhaps it is because there is an emptiness inside of me, a void that only I can fill.  Without clearly understanding who I am, how I became this person and what caused this void, it seems there is no way to go forward.  So I have decided to go back, into my past, and discover what has shaped this person I call self.  You little book, are to be my time machine.  I once read that a journal is a good form of self healing, and oh how I need to be healed!  There is an ache inside of me, a tenderness that won’t go away.  I have kept diaries and journals off and on over the years, but they were always of the present, you will be a combination of past and present, just like me.  Perhaps together we can find the little girl again and try to recapture the dreams she cherished. 

            The words of the song, “Time Passages” slip through my mind . . . .”Buy me a ticket on the last train out tonight.”  I can hear the wheels of the train - clickity-clack; clickity-clack - going round and round inside of my head until the sounds blend to become the ticking of a clock, marking the passage of time and I think, ‘Time passes, is passing, every moment, of every day.’  And I realize that whether we choose to take the necessary steps to reach our goals or we sit back and wait for rescue it will continue to pass, for time waits for no man, or woman.  Each season will continue to merge with the next, as gently, as surely as a river flows to the sea; this great river of life that flows into the sea of humanity; and whether we choose to ride the rapids or stay in the shallows, it flows ever forward carrying us along, however reluctantly.