I Want To Be Younger But Keep All My Life Experiences

It’s not as much as I don’t like being as old as I am as it’s that I’m old to be the mom of my eight-year-old. Or, at least older than a lot of moms who have a kid that age. That’s why I want to be younger but keep all my life experiences.

I don’t want still-me-but-younger to have missed out on scuba diving, sky diving, or anything else I’ve lived. I just want to be younger while everything else stays the same.

For this week’s Finish the Sentence Friday’s prompt of sharing a previously published post, I’m using (but not re-publishing) one from 2014 about the time I was abducted by aliens and could change my past.

Last night, I was abducted by aliens.  One minute, I was peacefully slumbering in bed, and the next, I was standing outside on the sidewalk, looking at two creatures who obviously came from outer space.

I was strangely calm and wasn’t worried about being probed although I’ve watched enough movies to know I should’ve been.

They told me I was allowed to go back in time, and change one thing.

Obviously, this was an amazing opportunity! I was excited!

I started thinking about the one thing that I’d like to go back in time and change.

All of the witty comebacks that I’d not thought of until it was too late filled my head. I thought about the skank in high school who stole my boyfriend right before my senior-year prom. A freshman girl, of all things.

I thought about when that slimebucket of a CEO told me I’d have a job in spite of upcoming layoffs, laid me off the following week along with the rest of the marketing department, and then asked if I wanted to write the company a check for $8,000 to buy out my stock options (I didn’t write the check, thank goodness, being as they declared bankruptcy a month later and probably knew they were going to when they asked for my money).

Anyway. These aliens. A free wish!

To go back in time and change something is pretty exciting. What would I change?

I thought about it. A lot. You can probably guess by the title what I wished for…

Ultimately, I decided I’d like for my husband and me to both be 10 years younger than we are, while keeping everything else exactly the same, because I want my son Tucker to be Tucker, at his same age and same self.

I also want to have all the experiences that I have had.

I shared my idea with my new alien friends.

“I want to be younger but keep all my life experiences,” I said.

Brilliant, right?

At first, I thought they were confused, or were translating my words into their language or something.

They just kept looking at me.

Looking at me like I was a moron.

Honestly, it got a bit uncomfortable, so I started wondering what I’d said.

I just want to be younger but keep all my life experiences.

While trying to decide whether I’d offended them and should offer them some Doritos or beer, I began to fantasize about being younger but keeping all my life experiences the same.

I started thinking some more about how my new alien friends might pull this off.

Originally, I assumed they’d just condense Robert’s and my life experiences and make them happen at a more rapid speed, so that everything else – but our age – could remain the same.

Aliens have powers, after all.

But then I started thinking about it.

How they’d condense my life’s moments, and whether each moment being more brief might affect the outcomes and the lessons.

I asked how it would work, exactly.

I started to get nervous.

And the smaller of the two aliens told me how it would work.

More precisely, that it can’t work.

And I realized that it’s our experiences that make us who we are. Changing a single one of them creates a ripple throughout time and space, and that, in the end, it’s much too risky to change anything.

I woke up the next morning in my bed, and not on the sidewalk.

I gave thanks for my life, for its ups and downs, and realized that if there’s something I want to change, that I need to look at the tomorrows rather than the yesterdays.

I was extremely refreshed, although a tiny bit violated-feeling. Also? The Doritos and beer were missing.

This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post. I originally published this for Finish the Sentence on April 10, 2014 for “If I could go back in time… ” which was brought to you by Jennifer Schario Hicks and hosts Janine, Kate, Stephanie, and Me (Kristi).

Under the new Finish the Sentence Friday format, Kenya G. Johnson of Sporadically Yours and I host a different theme each week. On the fifth Friday of the month, we simply re-publish an old post, which I could’ve done with this but instead renamed it and wrote a new intro and changed a couple things (Tucker was 4-1/2 when I wrote this!).