until the end of the world

WOXY.com is playing U2’s “Until the End of the World” while I am sitting at my desk working on some editing job late in the evening (late for me is now 9 p.m. — hey, I have a 16-month-old son!). I am not sure I know everything about this song – and I don’t even have it on a CD or in MP3 form – but it has always felt very passionate and over-the-top. It makes me stop and listen. The song taps into some deep, strong feeling. Can’t explain it fully – but you have probably responded to a whole bunch of songs in this way. Whichever song it is makes you pause and listen for its entire length – it is a different feeling from singing along to some catchy tune (though you make sing along).

Anyway, I started thinking about teenage passions. And how when we are that age, nothing else matters. We think that is it. The boy we are in love with MUST know how we feel and must respond. That is all-important. We must escape from our parents because they could never REALLY understand. And we have such freedom: We can fail a test at school – even fail a class(I swear, I never failed, but I can close a couple of times) – and still move on, graduate, be successful. We can have a falling out with a best friend and never talk to her again – until we imagine we see her at Union Station ten years later and she looks lost, completely drugged out. But I digress…

I am a mother and a wife. I have work to finish for clients and a house to keep clean and organized (with husband’s major help, of course – I’d have it no other way). Yet I still feel like that teenager who could get sucked into a song – the feel of a song – the passion. It does not end even though I might appear older (I won’t say “old” yet) to a seventeen-year-old (such as my half-brother). I guess this is what I did not understand about my parents when I was younger – and I can only begin to see it in them now. It makes me more forgiving.

We never completely "grow up," or become what we think "grown up" is when we are teenagers. (I wonder about my husband’s aunt whose 100th birthday is coming up this October; does she feel the same way?). Maybe we confuse growing up with a loss of passion.