I took my daughter to visit my alma mater yesterday. She wants to do music education, so we toured the buildings, including the performing arts center where the sights and smells popped a cork, and a thousand memories exploded on my brain. I had to catch my breath.

As I watched the young people with their computers and books and backpacks dotting the backdrop of this beautiful campus, my age hit me. I don’t feel old. I feel about 20 on the inside, where I really live. I half expected to see old friends walk past, smiling casually and waving hi. But my old friends, if here, wouldn’t look themselves anymore. I do see other parents my age, and I search their faces for signs of familiarity. But they, too, would be hidden beneath greying, slightly rumpled visages. I observed the serene, seasoned Guardians with their hesitant, inexperienced Charges – and the confident, “I’ve got this” Scholars. All of us walking on the same real estate. Each taking their turn at life.

Part of me wishes desperately to go back so I could do it again and make different choices. View things through a different window. Change some of the outcomes. Mentor and heal myself. But that isn’t possible, and part of me wants to run as far and as fast as I can from this place. I don’t belong here anymore. It isn’t mine. It belongs to my daughter now. This will be her future. Her hopes will find soil here to take root and grow into a life. Her life.

Life is short. A cliche, but striking in its bare bones truth. Because I am moved on to this middle stage of life, but my mother, who was here with me 26 years ago, has moved into the last stage. A flash, and here we are. Another poof of smoke, and we’re gone. Game over. Just like that.

So I think about significance, because that is what I’ve craved my whole life. To be meaningful. For there to be a point to my brief life. I look for that in what I do. In the people I surround myself with and the ways I think they view me. In my accomplishments. In my work. In my children. In my home. In my marriage. But I haven’t found it in any of those things. I felt somewhat defeated walking on that campus. Like I failed this life God gave to me, somehow.

I wish I could go back to that girl I used to be and tell her. Tell her she is significant simply because she is. Tell her she doesn’t need to be married to be safe and loved. Tell her she doesn’t need to be perfect to be heard. Tell her she doesn’t need to be successful to matter.

But she is gone. That girl is over, and I am what is left. Instead of getting bigger, I have been compressed into something small. Maybe a seed? I hope so. Because inside a seed there is potential for something living to grow up toward the light. I used to think in my uber conservative, somewhat ascetic mindset that, as mothers, our job was to die. Just die and let the children live. But I think God sees it differently. We are all His children, no matter how old we are and no matter what we did during our lives. God doesn’t carefully tend the potential-full college student more than the bent and twisted woman in the wheel chair at St. Johns Nursing Home.

That night I went to sleep in my room, and my daughter went to sleep in hers, and the Light beamed on us both. Because He knows that in the relativity of eternity, there isn’t much difference between us.