Reasons Like Seasons

Ah, graduation: the culmination of years of work, learning, and personal growth all wrapped up in a funny hat with a tassel. Oh, to be young again. When I graduated from high school in the summer of 2000, I had high hopes and great plans. I was about to leave town for a three week road-trip along the Pacific Coast, and upon my return I was going to UCLA as a member of the university's honor's program. I was the cream of the cream. I was the top of the top. But what is down on paper and what is locked in one's heart seldom match, and I was as (or possibly more) anxious, scared, and unprepared as the rest when I walked down that long aisle made of eight hundred white folding chairs on the football field. As I watched my peers pass by, I dreamed dreams for them: doctor, lawyer, musician, architect. Some of these dreams came true, some did not. But they were my dreams, so they didn’t matter. The test that counts is if people dream their own dreams and make those dreams ...

"Sure, baby. I'd love to watch Frozen again," I lie. A harmless lie, perhaps, but a break with truth to say the least. "If only it were for the first time," I think to myself, "for the first time in forever...." If someone had told me when I was pregnant how many lies I would tell my children, I would have probably laughed in his or her face. I would have  prognosticated on my relationship with the unborn with the authority of Nostradamus. "I will be completely truthful in all things with my children as there is no better way to communicate with others than with total and complete honesty. Children deserve our best self in all things, so lying to my child will be completely out of the question." Please, add that to the list of things I had no idea about. The stories I have concocted are numerous, nuanced, and occasionally nefarious, especially when it comes to the thoughts and actions of imaginary beings: "I'm going to ...