Do you fly? Do you dream you fly?

I was pretty melancholy today. The thing that really got me was a neighbor's graduation party. "E" is off to the Marines in a few weeks and who knows after that. When we moved in here, this boy was so young. E was 15 and saving for a car. We were desperate for a break one of those first weekends and his mom sent E over to babysit. Time has passed in a blink of the eye. E's parents are only just in the 40's, not much older than me. They're thinking about where E will be posted, what his career will be like, and even eventual grandchildren. Grandchildren. Will I know my grandchildren? I miss my grandmother every day, and she's been gone almost 3 years. She never met my kidlet, and I ache for that loss. It took me so long to have a baby, to start a career. I feel like I've done things out of order and now... will I have the time to be a part of it all? Every day I feel that I am part of things, learning things, growing in ways that maybe could have happened 15 years ago. When I was in high school, I tried out for a play called the Rimers of Eldritch. It was a precocious piece; there was this whole soliloquy about flying and dreaming of flying above the trees. Yeah, freaky. But stay with me here - that's not the point of the story. I remember a bunch of us huddled in the back of the theater waiting to audition. The directors put out a sheet and asked for volunteers to sign in the order they wished to go. Thus this big discussion - is it better to be first, last, or somewhere in the middle? There were points made one way or another. Discussion of birth orders, of being first, of blooming late. And it was like 15 minutes of this - with no one signing the freaking sheet - when finally the directors got fed up and just started calling our names as they recognized us. The first guy they called was actually a very popular jocky type who was, famously, one of 8 kids. Another guy yelled to him, "Hey, if you don't want to go first - I'll go for you." The guy yelled back, as he climbed on the stage, "Nah, it's cool. Better for me to just go when I'm called." As much as I embrace free will - and I do, deeply - there's a part of me that holds on to this. For whatever reason, THIS is when I was called to be kidlet's mom. This is when my career became a career. No sooner. No later. Whatever the drawbacks, whatever the benefits. It is what it is WHEN it is. There has to be a way to have a great peace with that.