Loosing our Innocence.

When I was sixteen I joined the Army. I was given a rifle and told (in not so many words) don't kill anyone unless you mean to.

In that first few months of being in the Army I crossed a line and lost my Innocence. At the time I didn't realise it but life had changed for me and I could never go back. When I came home on leave everything had changed, my friends, me, my position in life. Actually what had happened was I had changed, but everything else had stayed the same and not moved on much from where I had left it. Why should it? We were all only sixteen, we were in fact, still just teenagers. My friends saw life through a much more innocent set of circumstances than I.

I do not regret those choices I made, they have helped create who I am today.

I look at my daughter now, she is seventeen. She is trying so hard to be grown up but the truth is, she is still a teenager, a child. I like that and I understand that soon she will also have to become an adult. I don't want to hold her back or get in the way, in fact I want to do everything I can to prepare her for that day when she leaves home and is ready to take on the world on her own terms. But until that time comes she will be my little girl and that is fine by me.

A childhood is a precious thing and should be cherished, not abandoned and forgotten.