Creative Essay (another one for my teaching certificate)

Black Balloons

In my kitchen drawer I found a little cake decoration – five plastic black balloons on a stick. I've kept it for three years. Must be the thought of sharing it with someone else, to put it on their birthday cake. This unattractive decoration was used on my own 50^th birthday cake.

I remember driving to work that morning and repeating to myself: “I am 50! I'm 50 years old! How can I be 50?” I then called my parents and asked them the same question. They replied that they felt the shock even more. After all, I am their first-born. How could they be parents of a 50-year-old woman?

That workday was full of surprises and jokes made by my coworkers. I walked into an office full of more black balloons, so many that I could hardly walk through them. (In fact, I tripped on one and fell. Now that was icing on the birthday cake!) There was a wheelchair, a cane, Geritol, Exlax, and various hot flash remedies. It was all in good fun and I enjoyed myself. In fact, I felt somewhat “freed up” that I'd made this wonderful milestone. I was very thankful that the Lord had given me 50 years of good life, of blessed life.

But those black balloons were just the beginning of my struggle to discover the answer to this question: Now what? I've raised my children and I'm in a job I love but will I continue to just coast through life in an oblivious haze? These last few years have been re-examining years.

The real shock to my system was born in March, 2009. She was beautiful with flaming red hair. My first grandchild. Then a second tremor, a blond and blue-eyed baby boy, was born 18 months later. Now I am known not only as John's wife,  my parents' daughter, or Joe's assistant, but Maddie and Landon's grandmother. How could I be the grandmother of two? I'm only 53. I feel too young.

I am overwhelmed by God's gifts to me in these two happy and loving babies. Every so often I struggle some against my roles. I'm a wife, mother, sister, daughter. I'm now a mother-in-law and a grandmother. I am amazingly blessed. I know God understands my very contrary state of mind these days. He is teaching me so much through it.

I would never want to go back to age twenty, thirty, or even forty. I am at a peaceful place in my life and marriage for the most part. Here in my fifties, I love my routine, my rut. I like to sleep in my own bed. I don't want to rock the boat. Yet, I become restless at times and ready to rebel.* But, in order to continue to grow in awareness of my purpose here on earth, I must be willing to take risks, to travel, to do something as simple as going on a lunch “date” with my husband on a moment's whim. I have to be willing to drop what I'm doing to play with the babies. Those babies will be grown very soon.

One of my favorite Bible passages sums it all up for me: Psalm 16:2, 5-6, 11

2 I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing.”

5 LORD, you alone are my portion and my cup; you make my lot secure.

6 The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.

11 You make known to me the path of life; You will fill me with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand.

*Note to reader: Women in their fifties can be unpredictable. A mentor of mine once told me that was the only time in her life that she honestly thought she was going crazy. I know what she means now!