Don't you wish there was a way of knowing what things were lasts? First steps, first day of school, first love, first day on a new job. These things are easy to mark, and celebrate, but lasts often pass by without us even knowing.
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I'm feeling a little nostalgic at the moment, but that's not the right word, maybe the word is forlorn. And it's all been triggered, by all things, by a birth scene in some random television show I was watching recently.
I was good at giving birth. Sure it hurt like crazy, but that moment where your child slips out of your body is one of the most euphoric experiences you'll ever have. I know in my heart I don't want another baby (or do I?), grand children will do me quite nicely, and I plan to be a super nan to make up for a lot of things, but oh to experience that sensation again, or to have paid more attention to it when my six-pound-something lump of a lad came into the world.
To have celebrated how clever I was, how clever mother nature was. What a damn miracle it was. How wonderful my children were from the moment they drew their first breath.
There have been other things happening too. All of a sudden I didn't have to drive my children to school every day. I liked that commute, a chance to catch up on the day, to have those conversations you can only have in a car, just to be with them. Road trips are a thing of the past for the most part. I miss that.
I watched a young mother in the pool with her toddler the other day, at swimming lessons. Singing the same verses, doing the same techniques, following the same instructions. I think I remember my last swimming lesson. The boy was a quick learner, able to run across the foam mat, monkey his way along the pool edge, long before other kids in his class. He was getting too heavy to hold up in the water and didn't need me anyway. We were done with that.
And then, while out on a walk, I watched a father teaching his daughter how to ride her bike. He was losing his patience, she was on the verge of tears, but he held a firm hand in the small of her back when she needed it. I wanted to tell him that soon she'd be pedalling away so fast he couldn't catch her. So don't lose your patience.
And then, on The Bachelorette this week (which I'm hesitant to write about, but god I love it), Ryan, who had been DM-ing Bachelorette Angie for a year, finally had some one-on-one time and when they pashed (cue the Punkee tongue) he said that could be my last first kiss. (This is where I gauge my readership and I fear I have lost 75 per cent of you.)
Remember your last first kiss? I hope you do.
But perhaps at 52, it's not about my firsts and lasts. While I hope, in the next 30 years or so, I might get to experience a lot more firsts - the first time I work overseas, the first time I see my name on the front of a book, the first time I can look a man in the eye and know something different from what the past 30 years have brought - I know that my future is perhaps made up of lasts.
But it's not all about me. While we all want our children to grow up, we should have paid more attention to the last time we tied their shoelaces, or helped them climb in the playground, or the last time you stretched out beside them and read a story together.
These things just stopped happening and while there may be some sense of relief about some of it, it would be nice to remember that last time.
Some lasts you know are coming. My daughter has about a month left of her school life. It's been sad, but fabulous in a way, to watch her and her school friends celebrate their lasts.
There's been plenty of tears, after last hockey games, last school productions, indeed the holidays just gone were her last school holidays. No more 12 weeks off a year for you! They're marking the occasions with posts and parties and much emotion.
How do you tell them that these lasts will only lead to so many more firsts? That there's so much ahead of them that they shouldn't dwell on such things as much as this sad old lady has done of late.
That when you least expect it, when you think all your firsts have passed you by, something will jump out of you. And it will be a first.