The Better Half

I was sitting in a hospital waiting room last week, aimlessly watching CNN while I waited for my appointment for a sonogram of my right breast.  As I sat there, CNN ran a story that proclaimed that a baby girl born in the U.S. today can expect to live to age 81.  I immediately thought that right at that minute I could be halfway through my life.  I was, almost to a day, 40.5 years old.  

It seems weird to think that I'm halfway through my life.  It really is true--the days are long, but the years are so short.  I feel like I have tons of time left, but who of us really knows?  And even if I reach my 81 year mark, the first 40.5 have certainly flown by.  I feel like I will blink, and it will all be gone.  I will be an old version of myself before I know it.  Hopefully.  Or, perhaps I should say "Ojala."  

As I sat there in the waiting room of the women's imaging center, listening to the "soothing" indoor waterfall and hoping to get in soon for my appointment, it made me want to seize life by the balls and do something really grand with it, something meaningful and groundbreaking and special.  It made me think of legacies.  What will mine be?

And then I remembered that I am raising two feisty, intelligent, independent, kind, exuberant, talented, loving young women, and nothing in the world could be more important than that.  These next four decades, if I have them, will be amazing, simply because they--the girls--are.  There can be no more important legacy than that.