For the past week or so, I have had a line from Ahead by a Century stuck in my head.

                                      No dress rehearsal, this is our life

It’s how I feel these days, with so much changing, evolving, happening all at once. When I try to digest all that’s happened in the last eight months, it’s overwhelming, in the most wondrous way possible. I’ve found my birth family, and they’ve integrated into our lives. We’ve sold our first family home and moved. We’ve had thrilling opportunities and frustrations, fun times and sad times, and it’s been one of the most interesting years I’ve lived.

I feel so thankful for everything in my life, for everyone. Some call it luck. I guess maybe if you believe in that kind of thing, that’s what it looks like from the outside. It’s not that I don’t sorta buy into the idea of luck, but it’s that I’ve lived all these years, and I know what we’ve all been through, and how we got to where we are today: not so much luck as brute determination and pin-pointed focus on the positive.

The days go by and I try my best to fill them with love and experience, hoping that as my kids grow into adults, they become happy individuals, filled with the knowledge that we sit behind them with arms open, always. I hope they are confident and compassionate, caring and kind.

And when I reflect on who I am, individually and as a part of the team I became part of when we chose to get married and have our kids, I focus on my positive achievements and not my failures, and try to do better, always. I do my best, and sometimes I admit that my best isn’t really that great, but aren’t we all a work in progress? I hope so. I’m trying.

So I’m trying hard to let the people I love know that I love them. I’m trying to let go of frustrations and always be positive, and recognize others’ best, too. I’m taking time to have empty hands ready for the tiny crafts placed in them by my kids, to leave electronics behind when we sit at the park and I just stare at them playing. I want to read more books, and write more words, and do more kindness and worry less and spread goodness and just really hope that whatever life I’m living makes a positive impression.

I leap in head first, because that’s the only way I know how. Now is my chance. This is my time. If we only get one shot, and there are no dress rehearsals, then this is my life and it’s time to make it all that I want it to be.

I just really want my mark to be a good one, you know?