I’ve been crazy emotional since the day I arrived. I have always been all about feelings. I have a history of laughing hard, crying harder and experiencing other people’s stuff in a deep and profound (and sometimes debilitating) way.  Nobody can empathize with you, like me. I’m a “feeler.” This means I could not be a nurse, or a doctor, or a veterinarian, because I instead of being able to see how I was helping, I would just want to lay down and die from the feeling of watching someone else be in so much pain.

My feelings about things can overwhelm me in a Niagara Falls kind of way. Today is Jake’s SWS graduation. SWS stands for School within a School, and is a super cool program at the high school that he particpated in just this year. It’s self-governed, small and unusually amazing. On Sunday, the bigger graduation happens. I am like an emotional tornado. Don’t stand too close, or I will cry on you. Don’t say hello, or I will spring a hurricane of tears in your face. And while they are happy tears, they’re also sad tears, tears of time gone by and wonderment of how and where the little baby I gave birth to went (is he in like Sweden, still a bundle of adorableness)?

Anyway, I am grateful today for the experience of watching my child grow to be a high school senior, healthy and in tact. I am grateful for the awesome privilege it has been to watch another human being become. It is an extraordinary thing to see and feel. Even though, it comes with so many overwhelming highs and lows. I’m lucky to have had this, to have experienced this. And it would all be just amazing, if I could just stop crying.