I awaken, groggy from a night of multiple wakeful periods where I toss and turn to find a comfortable position. My body is one big ache. I pull on my slippers and hobble to the bathroom, my cats doing their best to murder me as they wind around my legs, reminding me that they need to be fed. But no, kids, Mother has to pee— desperately— before anyone gets fed. Then it's time to get ready for another eight hours or more of smiling through my chronic illnesses and persistent pain as I take care of my patients. I try to remember to be thankful that I have a job. I remind myself of how much I love my residents. I tell myself, “It's ok. You're going to be fine. You can do this.” After twenty-six years of nursing, that mantra is wearing thin. I am fifty-three years old, but I can't be. Not really. I just remember turning thirty. My older son is thirty now. But he can't be, not really. Just last month he was 3 weeks old, coming home from the hospital at last. He had been born with a deadly blood infection, but he had survived with no ill effects. I'm still celebrating. I step out of the shower and try not to look in the mirror. I wonder if I'll be single until I die. Two failed marriages seem like quite enough. And I enjoy living alone. At least, I think I do. My older son thinks I'm depressed and isolating myself from society. Is he right, or am I? I wonder. Do I know my own mind? As I drift back to myself, I realize how late it's getting. I vigorously towel off and drink a few more gulps of coffee. My baby is twenty-eight now, only that's impossible, because he was a newborn just last week. He had been as vigorously healthy as his brother had been sick. I remember them together as little ones, wrestling, playing video games, wrestling over video games. It was just a few days ago. I take my pills. When did I start collecting chronic illnesses like baseball cards? I plead with the cats not to destroy anything while I'm gone as I leave home for the day. OK, I know what the calendar says. When I do look in the mirror, I see the older woman squinting back at me. I know my kids are grown and on their own. But that's not how it really is. No, I'm going to suddenly awaken, my head on a desk in the library at college. I'll find I'm really just eighteen, no kids, no marriages, no divorces, no job in a field in which I had no interest, but trained in it to support my little family. No single parent struggle, no Hurricane Katrina. I'm just eighteen, with big hair, just broken up with my high school sweetheart, still living with my parents. All that other stuff had been a long, elaborate dream as I dozed off over my books in a little cubby space next to the autobiographies. I'll wake up having learned myriad lessons from the mistakes of my dream. I'll begin living the life I should have lived. I'll have the “right” relationship and the kids will come when they're “supposed” to. I'll actually have the career I want. I'll do everything on my terms, just as I had always said I would. I wonder how many others around my age have that Peggy Sue fantasy of starting over, knowing what they now know. I do know that when I talk about time and aging with my friends from high school, they're also in shock about the rapid current of their lives. We talk about the happy events, of course: children, grandchildren, careers, degrees. But like me, some of them also wonder why they made the decisions they made, why they didn't do the things they said they were going to do, when their personal priorities shifted or became non-existent. When their sense of direction left them. When they fell asleep and woke up as middle-aged people. The workday has ended and I'm home again. My chronic pain, exacerbated by being on my feet most of the day, has me desiring nothing more than to curl up in bed and sleep until morning. But there's whatever chore the day entails to be done, and dinner to eat so I can take yet more medicine. I text my sons, getting updates from their lives. They live in other states now. I hope I can get some vacation time soon so I can go visit them, but it's not likely, as we've been short-staffed lately and they say I can't be spared. When I finally do crawl into bed, my eyes are wide open again. I tell myself I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be in life, even if that is far from where I thought I'd be. I tell myself that all the mistakes I've made were necessary learning experiences. I do believe those things. But the only thing that gets me to finally doze off tonight is the whispered promise I make to myself that when it is time to wake up again, I'll raise my eighteen-year-old head over my books, having dozed off in my college library .