Staring at the sun.

I was talking to my childhood best friend, KB, last week. And we were remembering all of things we used to spend hours talking about the phone.

I do mean hours. Hours and hours. Of course, this is before cell phones, so we were closeted in our bedrooms or chained to the kitchen table, our ears glued to the receiver, while we solved the world's problems and our latest fashion crisis. Sometimes, there was pain involved in a telephone call and not just the sort related to finding out that Brad Barrett, my unrequited crush, had no interest in me whatsoever. No, I bear the scars of elbowing my sisters out of the way during a race to the ringing telephone. Seriously, I have an actual scar. Once, I broke ahead of Sister E on our mad dash to the phone, but fell and slid into the hip-height air-conditioning vent in the kitchen. I've got a major scar on my leg, but, yes, still managed to get up and answer the call first.

After more time on the phone than "The Hills" cast spends looking for a photo opportunity, KB and I had it all planned out. She was going to be a teacher, maybe work for a few years and have a passel of children. Probably five or more, of both genders, and live on a farm. Me? I was going to be single and living the high life in New York City, busting bad guys with my mad skillz as an investigative journalist for the Times. I'd travel the world and maybe write a novel about my experiences. All of this by the time we were 25.

Ha.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Life isn't at all like we thought it would be - and nothing like the Sweet Valley High or Danielle Steele books we passed back and forth for years. (Hey, KB - I'm almost positive that my copy of "Gone With the Wind" is actually yours. And I still haven't read it.) It's amazing to me how much life changes between the years of 18 and 22. You graduate from high school and the world is full of sunny promises, a new dawn is breaking and it's up to you to follow daylight into twilight, and not get burned along the way.

But we do get burned. We also get blinded. Yet, it helps us see where we actually belong.

I'm not a Pulitzer-prize winning, New-York based journalist. I doubt I could afford the rent! And I'm sure, by now, my career would have been squeezed out by the Internet, anyway. I have seen some of the world - and not for work, but pleasure. I don't get to spend my money the way I want to all the time. Instead of the Burberry patent leather bag I'd give my right arm for, I'm morally obligated to finance the furnace we're getting next week and the washing machine being delivered between noon and 4 p.m. Monday. I do, though, live in the a home four times as big as the New York apartment of my dreams.

And if you'd asked my 15-year-old self if someday I would be a wife and mother of an almost three-year-old, I would have given you an obscene hand gesture. Then started laughing. Yet I wouldn't trade those roles for a Tiffany solitaire or anything else in the world.

I don't have any regrets. I swear I don't.  Would I do things a little differently? Sure.  I wish Dr. X and I had skipped the big wedding and went straight to the honeymoon. I wish we'd traveled (even) more before Daughter X came along. I wish I'd started a family sooner. I wish I'd never stopped writing - I feel 10 years behind. But those aren't regrets, they're just suggested revisions to life choices. There will be other chances to shine. I know there are plenty of major decisions ahead that I'll have to determine what work best not just for me, but my family.

The future's so bright, no doubt I'll have to wear shades. Plus, a little SPF 5,000 - I roast easily.