Honestly, half the time you're not in charge of reinvention ... circumstances are ... a love one dies ... maybe your spouse ... your child ... you lose the job ... or the Uncle named Sam makes impossible demands you can't possibly meet ... takes things from you which shouldn't possibly be given.
So your life is reinvented ...
Immediately!
And there's no going back to the life that was.
No matter how much you may want to go back, the only option is moving forward.
Well ... not moving at all is another option but ... that's just choosing to slowly kill yourself ... which isn't much of a choice at all ... but God knows a lot of people live this way.
I'm tallying things up and ... I've been incredibly successful twice in my life ... but ... as Soren Kierkegaard one said ... have had MAGNIFICANT failures!
I've been divorced twice ... but am so very happily married ... successfully raised 3 kids who are successful in their own rites... am now raising 3 more girls ... tried to be in love until I've learned what love really is ... done stupid things and really spectacular ones too ... am "growing older but not up" ... embrace how easily I cry while struggling to understand how repulsive or silly others find it ... wondering where everyone who used to love me went?
Into their own lives I suppose.
Leaving me incredibly thankful for who loves me now!
Today I took the girls to school ... an incredibly morose and screwed up affair ... not the girls ... the school!
Pulling up to the curb, the girls lavish me with me love ... hugs and kisses ...till I stop, lean over to pull the latch for them to get out ..."
"NO," Laurel yells. "Pull up! A teacher has to open the door. We can't do it."
"What in the Hell are you talking about?" I ask and they move from loving children to very disciplined ones in a nanosecond.
"Good Morning," some teacher says opening the door for the girls to get out.
"Seriously?" I ask.
"You have a good day," she says sounding like a teacher.
"HEY," I yell ... and use a verb followed by a pronoun.
Obviously impressed with my syntax she gives me a wonderful display of single digit dexterity.
All of that to say ... I love my life ... love my wife deeply (and I mean that in every sense of the word) ... intensely proud of my children and loving raising girls who intensely love me ... don't think much about the old lives I've lived because I like this one so much.
Then it strikes me ... Teachers ... they're the problem.
Always have been.
Always will be.
