It was 20 years ago today...

Twenty years now

Where'd they go?

Twenty years

I don't know

Sit and I wonder sometimes

Where they've gone

-- Bob Seger, Like a Rock  

I don't know either, Bob. ;)  I guess there are a few of the finer details that have faded from my memory -- but most of my memories of that time are still pretty clear, and some of them are (still) pretty painful.

I wish things were different. I wish she was here. She'd be all grown up now, a young adult, likely at university, maybe with a boyfriend. (I was 20 when I first met her father, after all...)  I wonder what she'd look like, and who she'd look like, and how she'd be like me and how she'd be like her dad.

But she's not here.

Still, I would not wish away these past 20 years, painful as some of them have been. I am so proud to be her mother -- even if it's not the motherhood experience I had envisioned or expected. I have learned so much about myself, about people, about life and about the world -- about what truly matters -- things I probably would never have known or understood so well, had it not been for Katie.

To throw in another Sergeant Pepper/Beatles/classic rock metaphor (beyond the title of this post)  ;)  if there's a reason I've survived these past 20 years, it's because I've gotten by with (more than) a little help from my friends, both in real life and in the computer. ;)  If you are reading this blog, then you are probably one of them, and there aren't words enough to thank you all and tell you how much you have all meant to me. How much you all still mean to me.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you again.

And sometimes late at night

When I'm bathed in the firelight

The moon comes callin' a ghostly white

And I recall

I recall...