Milestones

I often am captivated by a picture of my niece taken a year or 15 months ago. So much has changed. Back then she was in the practice-walking with anyone who will hold hands while she proudly high-steps phase. She has a few words but mostly used baby signs. She ate soft foods but many things like veggies were still baby food. And you blink and there's a little girl who doesn't even toddle much anymore except when she runs, who has graduated from those signs to saying sentences and paragraphs. Going back even further, I often stand in awe looking at a picture I have from the first time I saw her when she was a day old. Her little foot is near my hand and looks so tiny. Now she prefers not to wear them (just like her Aunt Jen) but she does wear shoes. With a child we look at these markers as developmental milestones. But in reality life is just a lot of milestones. We start kindergarten. We graduate from high school. We learn to drive. We finish college and get our first job, our first apartment. Many people marry and have children. The thing is that after a certain age it is no longer an obvious sequence. For me some of those things have been completing my master's degree, my rocky work history, my first psych stay, whooping cough (that's a big one), last year's surgery, various intervening times I don't remember well, and now this. That's all this surgery is. It's life-chaning, I hope in a good way, but at this moment it helps to think that it's just one thing and then life goes on for the next step. It's just hard to remember that for very long. Copyright 2006 www.masterofirony.blogspot.com