Posted By Daisy on August 12, 2010

I’m on a plane now returning from the first vacation of longer than one day without my son, joining my husband on a business trip onto which we tacked a couple extra days for leisure.    It gave me an opportunity to see my Alma Mater again, and apparently I turned a tad melancholy.  Many things remain the same, and a few things are quite different, but enough was familiar to cause a flooding of memories.   I think that when you are a mother, the present takes up an enormous amount of space leaving little room for rumination, so this odd mood I was experiencing was not very familiar to my husband.  I don’t precisely miss the 20 year old me — I certainly don’t miss all her drama — but I miss her energy.   I miss the strange confidence of having decades laid out before me and feeling certain that I was meant to do important things and cause great changes.   I’m not a glory days sort of person; while I have many fond, intense memories of that time I know it wasn’t perfect, and that some of my most difficult struggles happened there on that campus.  I’ve no desire or need to whitewash the experience, but I remained wistful.  I feel like I don’t have much time left and i worry about whether I’ll be able to make the most of the next decades.   As I was pondering all this, somewhere in the recesses of my brain The Beatles began to sing to me…I had the melody and snippets of words, but that was all.  Later I looked up the lyrics and I think I understand now what Paul and John were trying to tell me.    There is and will always be a place for past memories, but those feelings of nostalgia are just that.    They take nothing from, and do not threaten, the present.  So as I head home to my real and present life I can tell my family and son that “in my life, I’ve loved you more.”

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Categories: Daisy's Story
Tags: college memories, In My Life, nostalga