Growing Up

I was told my entire life that I'll be a great mother. I've always been a motherly figure to my friends and I love taking care of people. Well, now I am a mother. My daughter was born on May 24th and I love her to death. As much as I love her I always have that little voice in my ear saying "what if". I miss being at Hope College and everyone I met there, I miss being able to go out in the evening without having to find a baby sitter (usually my parents) and being on a few hour time restriction so that I can get back in time to feed her next. I miss being able to sleep for hours on end without really having to think about getting up and moving on with my day. But even though I do sometimes wish I could have my old life back I wouldn't change what I have now for anything. I love my baby girl and nothing will ever change that.
But a warning to those who are younger than me. All your life you want to grow up, become an adult, be independent, and so on. For me I always wanted a man and a family. I have that, I'm engaged to be married to my baby's daddy who I love very much and I have a beautiful baby girl. But you don't realize what you had until it is gone. I never fully appreciated the stages of life I was in because I was always looking ahead to what's next. As the saying goes "Take time to stop and smell the roses". I never took time to look around and really appreciate what was going on in my life at any particular time, I was always wanting to move on to the next thing. That's our society though, we're always wanting to move on to the next thing because in our eyes they're bigger and better. Just appreciate where you are in life and, although preparing for the future, enjoy the stage you are in now. Every day, every moment, shapes you to who you become and so therefore you have to go through these moments to be a (hopefully) better person in the end.
One of my all-time favorite movie quotes is from Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and it goes a little something like this:
"...he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18... Ah, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? High school-those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that."
So I'll let you take what you want out of it, I know what this quote shows me and I hope it will show you something too. Sometimes some of the most valuable lessons can be learned from Hollywood, but not always, sometimes the messages Hollywood sends us are just wrong and usually crude.