My high dive personality and other musings

I've been having this growing period lately. It's a little like going through a time warp. I see all the past events flying past me as pictures, and I'm realizing how different I am becoming, even as I admire my new growth, and experience the sadness of losing my old form. The butterfly has always been a wonderful analogy for growth. I'm sure, even as its wings are drying, the sun shining on him, he looks back and wonders if it will be ok to be a butterfly, he was so comfortable being a caterpillar, and then a larvae...
The sadness engulfed me yesterday. Thinking of J and the kids going up to the farm for Thanksgiving, a big family tradition for so many years. I mean how much more iconicly American can you get? A family of 40 or more, gathering in a big old farmhouse that sits on 40 acres amoung the rolling hills. Even the drive there feels so nostalgic and peaceful every time, like you are going back to another time when life was more simple. Driving up and over the hills in the blackness, not knowing what'll be on the other side, or if you're headed there during the day, seeing the rolling greenery, the big rolls of hay dotting their skin.
Was that how it really was when I was there? or just how my storytelling  mind remembers it? Wasn't I more concerned with going over my plans to convert these medically minded farmers to my natural birthing theories? or to educate them in how their bodies worked to give birth? Oh Lord. I can laugh at myself now, remembering how I dragged J's cousins out in the cold entryway of the house where the fold out dinner tables and chairs had been set for the next day in rows, as if for a church social event. There may have been one curious and willing participant in those "discussions" that mostly consisted of me preaching my latest obsession to them. I preached the values of knowing what your body is doing at all times. It was relevant to us, as most of us were in the throes of early childbearing, needing to know when we were fertile and not fertile. But the part I look back on with amusement is that I was so hell bent on getting these women to do what I was doing. I wasn't cherishing the value of getting together with family once a year. I was on the warpath to convert these poor ignorant souls; to save them from the evil medical establishment that tries to pull the wool over their eyes and keep them from understanding their own bodies. Oh that is enlightening to see myself in such a way. Maybe someday I will learn to settle in to the grey of life, like J used to tell me. Or not. I mean, really, that's just who I am. At least now I can separate myself from the experience enough to realize when I am starting to climb that high dive ladder.