Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

Instinctively, my answer is no. There isn’t an age or year of my life that I would re-live. Everything happens for a reason. Every year catapulted me to where I am today. Yes, every year had happy moments. Some more than others. There was a little dirt mixed in with the sugar of each of those years, though, some a lot more than others. Who wants to re-live the bad?

I’d like to go back to certain moments in my life, though:

• Those quiet times, when everyone else in the house was sleeping, rocking and nursing each one of my newborn babies, exhausted but mesmerized by the little life I created.
• The immense pride I felt celebrating succeses: graduations, sober dates, won matches, writing awards, aced tests, perfect welds, displayed art projects, promotions/new jobs, and hearing the ignition crank on my husband’s project car.
• The night at Busch Stadium where McGuire cracked another homerun, the stadium electric.
• Floating on fluffy, white rafts under crystal clear skies off the shore of Negril, Jamaica, one hand locked in my new husband’s, the other around a tropical drink.
• First dates, first kisses, first “I love you”s.
• Purchasing my first house, knowing that not so long ago, I had a kid, $500, and nothing else to my name.
• My first F-16 aircraft launch that I nailed, moving around the jet with such confidence that it was like an extension of myself.
• Those moments where I finally pulled myself out of the dark times, knowing that all along I had what I needed to do so, within me.

Entire years have too many lessons learned. Certain moments, though? I’d re-live those in a heartbeat.

~Cari