Mirror, Mirror

It shocks me to say that this month my daughter will be twenty-eight and my son turned twenty-six in April, they're as old as I feel. Yet, that's the nature of things, moving along, surviving. As I've already said, in July it will be thirty years since I left school and in September, thirty years since I started my apprenticeship at Fords. I could go on and I often do.....hopefully, even though you're invisible, our relationship will grow despite my ramblings.

My daughter has been a baby machine, has had six children (but sadly lost one to SIDS) and keeps making me feel old as the grandchildren keep coming. My son on the other hand has just had two, well, he didn't actually have them of course, he's not like that. So, at the present moment (things change rapidly), at the ripe old age of 46, I have two healthy, and apparently happy, kids and a gaggle of grandchildren. Another continuing shock for me.

The initial three or so years in Canada set me and Karen into our adventure mode of life, we have a couple of friends from the UK who are very similar and we've forfeited the parent thing for travel. It's sometimes funny how us "DINK's" get treated, often people are curious as to just why we don't have kids, the truth being is that we're too spoiled with the way it is and just don't want them, two cats are responsibility enough and maybe, just maybe, when we retire there'll be a dog and lots of visits to the family.

In the last twelve years many sad things have happened, My daughter lost her son in 2000, my younger brother was killed by a drunk driver in 1992, my dad died in 2000 and my mum passed in 2002. That is life, as they say. It's a very strange thing to state that "if we are lucky" and live to a ripe old age, then everyone around us will die. As one of my Aunties says about the deaths all around her "been there, done that, got the tee-shirt", and another great, late, friend of mine, Jim Collins once said that "Life is like a tapestry, full of friends and relations, and then one day, you realise that they're all falling off until the tapestry is gone". Jim fell off my tapestry almost two years ago and it was like I lost my father all over again.

I have a philosophical outlook on all this, my brother fell down a deep water well in our garden potting shed when he was two years old, in reality, he should have drowned but somehow, he didn't. Someone notched an additional twenty years onto his life thank you very much.

My mum and dad had a great life over almost seventy years and everything collapsed in over a brief thirty-six months. A strange by product "silver lining" of my mums dementia was that she did not appear to grieve too much when my dad died although she choked me up completely at his funeral when I was holding her hand and she sang "The Lord is my Shepherd" in her little girls voice.

I see them all, every day when I look in the mirror.