I've got the pork roast cooking

and the chickens are next.

I've checked and rechecked my tamale facts.

I think I'm ready to try this as the grownup.

It's funny, isn't it? All these little things that you slowly pick up and take on as yours. I mean, there have been hundreds of them over the last 25 years or so. I became the wife, the mom. I am the maker of supper and the keeper of the check book. The business owner. The housekeeper and the taxi and weird-but-fun auntie pooh.

Every time there's something else that I pick up, there's a mixture of emotions - sorrow because that means I've lost another part of being young, nostalgia because I'm keeping those memories alive, pride because that is what I was put here to do, pure unadulterated fear because what if I can't do it?

Then I feel this connection to the universe, spine-deep, that says that what I'm feeling is what my mother felt, what her mother felt, and on and on and on. That this transitioning through things is perfectly expected and completely normal and that, for millennia, women have stood where I do and felt that pang inside them as they honored the tradition of the people that they loved. That, one day, my daughter will be standing in a kitchen and watching the holidays come and feeling this same mixture of pain and peace and pleasure.

You know, growing up is a real pain in the ass.