I see her face. I stare into her eyes. I focus on her smile and I wonder to myself….. was that really me?

Who took that picture? Who was I looking at? What was making me smile? Was I really that happy on this day. Was that smiley little girl really me?

I know the day that picture was taken. I know I was 6 years old. I know it was July 27th, 1969. I know it’s because it’s the day my mother married an American and that smiling little girl is me because I was her flower girl.

I know all this, but what I don’t know is why I can’t remember any part of that day? Why can I barely remember anything much at all, about being little? Why can’t I remember being a kid?

What makes a life ordinary? What makes a life extraordinary! If you think about it, NO Life is ordinary but not every life is extraordinary.

We all have a story to tell. Some are more involved than others. Some are calm, serene, fulfilling. I guess it’s all in how one conducts their life, and or how one sees it.

Sometimes, when all is quiet, I try and think as far back as I can. A moment in time as far back into my childhood as I can remember…. How far back can you remember?

There are snippets of moments that flash in my mind that I think are memories but I can’t be sure. I can’t really be sure that they are actual memories or pieces of a movie scene maybe, or a portion of a story I heard somewhere that have allowed me to form these pictures in my mind.

In old photographs, I see pictures of a little girl that people tell me was me but I don’t feel the connection to that little girl in the picture. I don’t remember the event that captured that little girl on film and to this day I stare at that little girl in that photo and wonder…………

Who was she, that smiling little girl?

An On-Line Journal. It’s an idea I had played with since way back. Back when blogging only first became a thing in my late teens, but considering that I felt like just another boring teenager moaning about how life was so unfair, and how I felt everyone hated me and how I had no friends, yadda, yadda, yadda….. Well, how many more stories like that are already out there and what makes my story any different than the next persons? Nothing! Nothing that hadn’t already been told, explored, uncovered or realized. I was just another lonely, teenage girl trying to break free of a mold her parents had formed around and about her, hoping for her to be. Wanting a perfect obedient girl who bobs her head up and down and says “yes, of course”.

Only I wasn’t just your typical ordinary girl. I wasn’t anything I could really understand. I was not anyone or anything good/bad or otherwise. I was not that, typical young American “girl next door” growing up in a “Pleasant Valley” type of town. I was not a native born American and there were some people who let me know it.

Nothing about me or my life was extraordinary but, nothing about my life was just ordinary either. Nothing about my life was tragic but I lived it tragically.

Forty “something” years later and here I am living that typical middle class American family life with a house, backyard two cars in the driveway, grown kids, a husband and we each have our paying jobs.

Each week day, you get up, to wash yourself up, get dressed and head on out to work for your 8 hour day. Come home make dinner, sit and relax before you go to bed, to wake up and do it all over again. Until, of course, you hit the weekend and then your get to sleep in a little, that if you’ve got the housework caught up during the week, because then you have dusting, sweeping, laundry, dishes (if no one has done it for you the night before), gardening and whatever else that needs to be done in the house that you don’t have a service come in and do for you. Basically, it’s just a never ending, same routine, day in and day out.

You think to yourself, it was so much easier when I was a kid, but then was it really? Because, I can’t really remember being a kid. Not the way my kids were kids. Not the way, I wish I could have been a kid.