6 pounds and 7 ounces not that long ago ...

Well it was 30 years ago because yesterday we celebrated Chris' 30th birthday!

Wow! I still don’t feel all that far past 30 myself. Oops! I guess the advantage to having kids in the first half of your twenties is that they sort of catch up to you along the way and eventually (and sure probably briefly) you find yourselves in a similar place in life. It’s interesting being your kid’s contemporary (same music, same movies, same sociability) and still being their parent. It’s all sort of analogous to us as pieces on a game board. Chris rolled the dice and landed on the slide labeled “grow up” and slid into the same space where I’d already landed after pulling the “get divorced, start over” and “get laid off, lose 2 turns” cards. For what it’s worth it seems that Kevin, at 27, has a slight lead on both of us, lol.

In adulthood, birthdays that end in zero are milestones that are a much bigger deal than all those in between. Recognizing that, last night there were presents and ice cream cake (yum!). One of the things I got for him was a little book entitled “Tomorrow”. It's a not-too-smarmy yet timely diddy for this stage of his life I think. Inside it I wrote him a short “mom note” (similar to the ones I used to write on his lunchbox napkins when he was a little) and the note was about having “hope”. Afterwards I got to thinking about hope and that brought to mind the myth about Pandora’s box and how she released hope from it not long after she’d unleashed all the other evil miseries that plague mankind and the world.

And then I thought, wait a minute ….

Isn’t hope a good thing?

Why was it in the same box containing all of man’s greatest torments?

I pondered this off an on all afternoon and couldn’t think of a reason. Finally, like Pandora, my curiosity got the best of me and I went looking for an answer on the internet and found the following.

“Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment."

Ouch! Have I just wished a torment on my kid?

“False hopes”, “high hopes”, “hope springs eternal” …. hope may prolong our torment but where would we be without it? I guess it’s the ultimate necessary evil so to speak and so, yeah, I still wish it for Chris as he turns the page and begins a new decade sure to make itself into a new chapter.

I do feel like he and I have reached that part of the world map though where it simply says “Thar’ be sea monsters here”.

Thank goodness I was raised by pirates ... and so was he :-)


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