It's so hard to say goodbye to yesterday.

Today is a bittersweet day for me. I have been on a leave of absence from teaching this school year, and today I made that permanent. For 31 years of my life, since I was five, I went to school in August, as a student and as an educator. For fourteen years I taught seventh through ninth grade students, and for seven months I have been a mom. The latter role won out for this chapter of my life.

There is a Sarah McLachlan song, whose title escapes me now, that keeps going through my head: "I have the sense to recognize that I don't know how to let you go. I don't know how to let you go." Even though the song seems to be about losing someone you love, I identify with it in a different manner, as I lose a me that I used to be. I'm not saying I am such a completely different person, that motherhood has reduced me merely to a cookie-baking, Yukon-driving, nursing-at-a-wrestling-tournament woman (although those are all a part of me now). I am still (mostly) the same person I have been. For example, I continue to love shoes, reading, cooking, my friends, my family, and being passionate (that is my husband's nice way of saying I am a hot-head). I have changed, however. I am a more complete person. I can relate more fully to the heartaches of parents and their joy in their children as well. I have smiled more in seven months than I have in ten years. It is a wonderful thing.

It is strange, too.

In two and a half short years, I have gone from one who was single, teaching, making and spending my own money, doing what I pleased, and caring mostly about myself, to one who is married, staying at home, carefully watching the one-income finances, doing what pleases my son and husband, and caring more about two other human beings more than myself. Heck, since May, I left my job for the leave of absence (I had to vacate the classroom I'd occupied and filled for four years), moved into a new home, and had a baby. It has been an adventure, to say the least.

I wouldn't trade it for anything. I really and truly wouldn't.

That doesn't make it any easier to say goodbye to this person I was. I loved her. Yet, this chapter is over, I will keep turning the pages, and what is yet to be written will one day be the ending of another era. I only hope I love this new me even more than the one to whom I bid farewell today.

I sing the Body Electric. I celebrate the me yet to come. I toast to my own reunion, when I become one with the sun. And I'll look back on Venus, I'll look back on Mars, and I'll burn with the fire of ten million stars. And in time, and in time, we will all be stars.