52 Weeks of 2013 - Week 36

So,  last week was my birthday. It was one of those big-number ones. I turned forty! To my eighteen year old self, that seems so old, but I know that to my sixty year old self I will look back and think I never had it so good. It's all relative. I don't feel any older and although I most certainly don't look eighteen, I think I'm holding up pretty well. (Please don't burst my bubble)!

I have been around for a while now. I wouldn't want to be that insecure seventeen year old who none of the boys at school were interested in, or the twenty year old wondering what she was going to do with her life... if she would ever find love, having already been tossed aside. At thirty years old I was coming close to having my first child, full of doubts of how I would be able to love a little person I didn't even know. The years that followed of utter exhaustion, but so much joy and so many laughs and sweet cuddles and all the firsts.

This new decade is an altogether new era. A stage of my life is now officially over. I have been completely responsible for at least one child for over nine and a half years but it has all changed. After taking all three of my kids to school two weeks ago, including my youngest, my baby, for the first time, I couldn't stop the tears once I allowed them to start. They were big fat tears rolling down my face, like my little girl's just a short while earlier. I kept swiping them away, willing them to stop, but they kept coming.

I can't quite figure out what I should do next, because my husband graduates from seminary in December and until I know where we are going to end up, it seems kind of pointless. I feel like so much has to be on hold.

So I'll keep taking photos, because that always helps and makes me happy. I'll keep trying to be the best Mom I can be and maybe try to keep the house a little tidier...maybe. I'm trying to look more for the positive and enjoy the little things, because they do matter. Trying to live more in the moment, trying not to worry about a path we have yet to travel, that has yet to become clear. We really do still have a lot of life ahead of us. Remarkable.

I prefer to be behind the camera, but I felt that I needed to document this important milestone and it was time for a self portrait. I promise you, I have not touched up my skin in photoshop at all. No softening, or lightening of under-eye bags or wrinkles, I did put on a little makeup, but you can zoom right in and see the real me, unaltered (although, of course I'd rather you didn't). Photographers have all sorts of tricks they can use to 'help' a person look their best, but that was not what this was about, this really is me, as I am, right now!

Here you go, eighty year old self...back in the day when you were still 'young'!