How do you feel today?

Confessions of a Housewife has started a fun new meme called Our Abstract Emotions.

Your assignment is to find a picture that abstractly expresses how you feel. What I mean by abstractly is a picture of something, a drawing, a image, that does not have you or another person in it. I don’t want to see pictures of a smiling face to show happy (nor a illustration of a smiley face! :-)) Do a google image search, take a picture, draw a picture. Then upload the image you choose to your blog and tell us the emotion you think it expresses.

How do I feel today?

Well… its my birthday today so I am feeling old. Yet, at the same time, I sort of still feel like I am in my 20’s. I look at my life and think back to when I was 15.

If you had asked me then where I saw myself at 31, I would have told you I would be married. I would have a few kids. I would be a teacher. I would love my job, my life and my family. Suffice it to say, its not how things turned out. I do have a child that I love dearly though and I wouldn’t trade him for the rest of it. I am going back to school in the spring to start the long road of getting that teaching credential. I am not sure I will ever get married, *laugh* I am not sure there is a man out there that wants me. If I don’t though, I am ok being alone.

At 15, I never thought I would enjoy being alone. I didn’t expect that the quiet would bring contentment. I didn’t realize it was not what I owned but how I acted towards others that counted. I had no idea that joy came from within, not the outside world. I also didn’t know that my honor, my self worth, my life would, or could, be based on my integrity.

I’d like to sit down with that 15 year old. I’d like to tell her all the things we will do, the things we will go through and the life we will live. I want her to know that through struggles and bad situations, we are able to choose how to let them define us and who we will be. I want her to know that I was proud of her then, that I remember how hard things were; but that I also am grateful we went through them. Without those experiences, I would be a very different person.