23 April 2011

Arriving To The Passage Of Time

I'm at my parents' house in Florida, having gotten here last night and almost immediately dozing off.  The latter is not so much a commentary on Mom or Dad as it is on how tired I was last night.

Anyway, today I went for a nice but familiar bike ride and had an equally nice and familiar dinner of Mom's lasagna.  Tomorrow is Easter Sunday; Mom is going to Mass and later we will have dinner.  The day after that, Mom and I are planning to have lunch with a friend of hers with whom we had lunch the last time I was here, at Christmastime.

Although this is all fine, and I enjoy it, I am feeling rather strange about it all.  Yes, Mom and Dad raised and supported me.  But who was that "me?"  And all those times in my I adult life I came to their house, wherever they were living, are among the reasons I am here now.  But who was that person who spent those holidays, those weekends and those days and nights with them?  That person had a different name from the one I now have, and made all sorts of choices and decisions I would not make now.  Some of that, of course, is a matter of what nearly everyone feels upon reaching the age I am now:  Nearly all of us have done things that, knowing what we know now, we wouldn't do.  I am sure both of my parents feel this way.  But, as you can imagine, for me everything was complicated by the fact that I was living, literally, as a different person from what I am now.

I can't help but to wonder whether they would be living the lives they're living, in this house, had they raised me as a girl--had any of us known that such a thing was even possible, as foreign as it would have been in the places and time in which we were living!  I can't help but to think--even if I can't explain why or how--there are things they might've done differently if they had been raising Justine rather than Nick, and those things would have affected other choices they made.  Perhaps I would have been better off, or at least I wouldn't have to learn the things I'm learning because I would have learned them earlier in my life.  But what of my parents, and my brothers:  Would they have been better or worse off?  Or would it have made a difference?


Maybe it's just the realization that they have less and less time left in this life that's causing me to realize how much time I lost or wasted.