This is beautiful. I truly grasp what you are saying about trying right generational wrongs, and change your family legacy. In many ways I feel I have been successful, but not in all ways. There are parts of my life that seem poisoned by the sins of my fathers (and mothers) no matter what I do.

But that said, I do know that I've changed the course of many things in my own life. And for those things I am truly grateful.

Forgiveness is difficult. Forgiveness of self is sometimes nearly impossible.

That was hilarious! I'm sorry about your feet. Mine have a date-stamp on them, too. I'm still wearing heels, but every day I wonder for how long.

And now I envy you. Not only are you hilarious, but men want to play with your feet. I've never had a foot fetisher proposition me, although my husband just offered to suck my toes after I read him this post. He knows how to make me feel better. I must be old now though because I'd rather he massaged them than suck them.

I like that. I am also a sufferer of this terrible condition, and it sucks. I miss the brain I once had. The one with all the nouns and knew where everything was.

I think my saying would be, "Age might be in your mind, but don't tell my knees that."

This is great! I can't wait to be a grandma now.

I know that I have allowed sickness in my life so that I could give myself the permission to rest and reflect. I wish it was more acceptable to just take to one's bed in health for the same thing. Then we could rest and reflect without feeling terrible at the same time.

I wish I could bring you some soup. Nothing feels better when you are sick than to have someone care about you and care for you. I hope you feel better soon and find that balance you are searching for. Relationships are just hard all the way around. I think even the perfect mate has flaws. I know I have flaws. But it doesn't seem to me that you are looking for perfect as you're looking for a grown-up. Grown-ups are awfully are not easy to find.

What an incredibly brave thing to do, and probably the one real answer if you want to preserve the sacredness of the marriage. It does us no good to hide the truth from our spouse when that truth is secretly driving a wedge between us. We might have saved the other person some bad feelings, but we've damaged the intimacy. I guess everyone has to come to their own decision, and some counselors say it is best to never tell about things like this because it is "selfish" to burden the other person, but relationships, especially a marriage relationship, is a burden sometimes. You's shown that one can be honest and in that way maintain integrity and respect. I admire you.

I write about sex sometimes on my blog, but I could not make it through this book. It wasn't the sex that hampered me, it was the insipid and completely unlikable heroine of the story. For God's sake, there is not a university graduate in literature in Seattle who doesn't have an email account!! How did she sign up for classes? How did she get her grades??

See, I can't enjoy my smut while having worrying thoughts about the heroine's grades, and whether or not she had late fees, or had to crash her courses to get in to class, because she couldn't registered for them on time for lack of an email account! Suddenly I'm thinking, "What sort of parents don't get their daughter at least a cheap laptop for college and help her sign up for hotmail?" Who cares about Christian Grey's horrible abusive childhood when neglect like that is going on?

And suddenly I'm not turned on at all; I'm just annoyed.

The fact that her only curse words are "crap" and "double crap" didn't help either.

I wanted to like this book. I really did. I even like a little kink, so I should have liked this book. But I couldn't. Maybe after that lobotomy I'm going to have someday I can give it another try.

As far as you, you are hilarious. I did feel bad right away for your dad, though. No French kissing? Really? That's sad. That's very, very sad. But before I could cry too many tears about your dad, you had me laughing about your pants. BTDT. Only for some reason getting caught by the police didn't hinder my love of parking too much. May I suggest you try it again? It really is fun when you're an adult and there aren't any parents to call. But I suggest you don't take the dog.

That damned chemistry gets me every. single. time.

This sounds like something that should be explored in depth in a future blog post. I'm liking the logic here.

This was terrific, Florinda. I appreciate your gentleness with yourself. Reassuring our young selves that the mistakes they are making are going to turn out okay feels cathartic to me. We really did do the best we could at the time, and the lessons we learned (and the babies we picked up along the way) make the journey all worthwhile.

My recent post Dear 20-Year Old Me