Around The Table

As I sat down to the dinner table at my aunt's house on Erev Rosh HaShana, I noticed how much it has changed in the past ten years, how much the seating arrangement and the people around it had changed. Yes, I know many things change in ten years, but I did not expect to see my role, the new teenager who recently started high school, played out by the oldest of my younger cousins, M. It never occurred to me that I would see myself in my younger cousin. Nor was I expecting to be placed in my older cousins' shoes.

Ten years ago, only one set of my older cousins had children (two daughters), and the other two sets of cousins were married, but no children (yet). Ten years ago, it was I who had just entered high school, I who did not want to be placed at the "children's table" (which essentially just consisted of myself and my younger brother), I who wanted so badly to sit and talk with my cousins like the adult I thought I was. It was I who was being asked about high school and what teachers I had, about the homework, classes, and books I had to read.

But as we sat down to begin our meal this year, I realized that it was not myself caught between childhood and adulthood, it was not I who had just entered high school and wanted to sit with adults in my family. I was already there. I was sitting at the table with the adults, talking to them as if I was one. M, my fourteen year old cousin, was in the role I used to play, and I was playing the role of the older cousin, the one she wanted to sit next to, to talk to, the one she looked up to. 

As she and I walked to my aunt's (her grandmother) house the next day from synagogue, talking like we never have before, I realized how nice it was to finally be at this point, to be able to talk to her more like the adult she is becoming, instead of the child she used to be. Then I thought to myself how nice it was that things were coming full circle, and that who knows, maybe in ten years, she will have the same revelations as I just did.