Someone took a photo of me the other day, a headshot for author purposes, and looking at it, I was struck by the fine lines around my eyes. I know thirty-one isn’t “old” and in a few years I will want to pat myself on the head and say, “You silly, young thing,” BUT the truth remains—those lines were not there ten years ago. The passage of time is slipping into my face, like ink blotting through a page, and I’m both mesmerized and conflicted. Time, that essential measurement of life, is a finite space into which I must fit maturity and understanding. Lessons learned. Battles won. In the time it took for these lines to appear, nearly everything that I’ve learned has come experientially. There’s no way to become an expert simply by being told. I can read instructions in a book on being a “loving wife,” or “relating empathetically, “or enduring adversity”—but the reality of them only comes through the doing. No one could tell me how to grow up. I simply had to do it.  The same photographer of my headshot also took a family photo—me, my husband, a little boy of nearly three, and a tiny […]

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