Lorem Ipsum

My mother would've been 69 years old today. So far I've been mostly okay, but with a couple of gusts of sadness.

I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I'm several years older than she was when she died. The idea that she was more or less at the same stage of life as friends of mine (late thirties, two kids) gives me a sort of double vision: on the one hand, she was my mother, a grownup, someone who I think I was only beginning to be able to understand as having a life of her own outside the context of being my mother; on the other hand, I think of parenting as only one part of who my friends who are parents are.

I'm having a really hard time articulating why this feels weird to me; maybe part of what I mean is that thinking in these terms reminds me that Marcy had friends and family who had a more complete picture of who she was than I did. I suppose this is a pretty mundane observation—we all have different perspectives on the people we know, and different relationships with them—but it does make me wish I'd known her better, or at least had access to a wider variety of perspectives about her.

Coherence eludes me. Think I'd better head off to work.