A childless parent's retrospective
Now that I'm into my 30s, I've been noticing a shift in the relational dynamic with both my mother and father. When did I ever get the idea that at a certain point I would know all the things I would need to know about them? Somehow I convinced myself that there is never anything more to them than what has already been disclosed, and that they are, in fact, done changing as people. How I would despair if someone cast me with such rigidity! Yet I am guilty of that very thing. I recently looked back through my own scrapbooks, ones that I kept and ones that my mother kept before I took over as a teenager. I read some of my old papers, looked at old photos, and it all seemed surreal. Is that person, staring at me, wearing diapers and a pair of her mom's sunglasses drinking her bottle at an attitude replete with sass... me? Did I really write a letter in 4th grade to the school board trying to dissuade them from taking "The Giver" off of the curriculum? There&#