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Maybe its that I am seeing my kids grow up way too quick (and they aren’t even two yet), but I read this poem today in a book I am working through and it affected me deeply. Its called On Turning Ten, by Billy Collins (poet laureate of the US).

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

What hit me from that was the last sentence. “I skin my knees. I bleed.” I thought of my little 23-mo old daughter last night as we were walking around the block. She was running along with all the joy of a little toddler and she tripped and fell. She banged her knee and for the first time that I remember, she didn’t get immediately up and shake it off. She kept pointing to her knee saying, “hurt.” It wasn’t more than a small scrape (barely a scratch), but it just struck me.