The picture I posted yesterday was from thirty four years ago. John's hair was the color of Belgian chocolate, and mine was curly from a low budget perm. The two kids next to us currently make more money than we do, and the son on my hip is over six feet tall.  

 

I was tickled that despite the shifts in circumstances and physique, social media recognized John. I on the other hand confused him/her/it. When I post photos of our youngest girls, Facebook tags one of my identical twins as me, and not the other. I guess there is no algorithm suggesting that there would be two of me. Which there aren't. 

 

It seems inevitable that we will become unrecognizable to ourselves at some point. Our jobs evolve, health falters, skin gets flabby. Certainly the oldest child in many families with more than the median number of kids has opinions about how his or her parents have morphed, usually not for the better, by the time the youngest sibling hits puberty. I know we did. Anger either got depleted in those first fifteen years, or I learned a better way to parent. I have no recollection of raising my voice to the last four kids, with the exception of Ben. I suppose I could apologize to the first batch, but maybe it would stir up bad karma. It also could be argued that I am less fun than I was in my twenties. The older set had a mom who would push them on the swings, and hike in Yosemite. The younger half only went virtual camping. 

 

Humans do not hold a monopoly on change. Tadpoles make a dramatic transformation into frogs, and anyone who has seen a newborn polar bear or joey will attest to their dissimilarity to their full grown counterparts. 

 

I suppose since there can only be one of me at the end of the Day, it behooves me to shed the more primitive characteristics, and slide into a version I would like to befriend.