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You’ve reached an age to make your own decisions. I hope you make those decisions because you feel they are the right thing to do, not because of peer pressure or because you’re trying to fit in.
At six feet, I had surpassed her in height, but standing there on the day of my high school graduation, it seemed that mirror revealed much more than our discrepancy in height. My mother had aged. We had celebrated her forty-third birthday that year, and now, standing so close to her, I could see the depth of the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, what she called her “worry lines,” and how her once-unblemished skin now displayed the inevitable markings that only time delivers.
Grandma O’Malley, who had come down for my graduation and waited downstairs in the living room, had once proclaimed, “Time is wicked. It comes and goes like a thief in the night, stealing our youth, our beauty, and our bodies.” I had watched Grandma O’Malley, a proud and simple woman, shrink and wrinkle and turn white over the years. But we expect that of our grandparents. Not our parents. For some reason, we think our parents will never grow old, perhaps because when they do, we are forced to acknowledge that we will one day grow old, and we face our own mortality.
I wanted to believe what every person on the planet wants to believe—that God had a plan for me, and that “God’s will” was not just a parent’s answer to silence a child who asked too many questions.
