A Letter to my Younger Self

Dearest Bea,

How you love your babies.

For years, you will love them unconditionally, you will care for them and spend sleepless nights when they are sick, and you will forgive them even when they don’t apologize, you will nurture them, you will protect them and that’s just the emotional side of it.  You will also work hard for a living for them, you will clean a house that will never seem clean, you will cook, you will do a ton of laundry and the pile will never go down…and there will seem like there is no end to the physical aspect just so that it can pair up beautifully with the emotional.

They will instantly fall in love with you and you will become their hero, superMOM, and the one who will solve anything and accomplish everything!  They will believe you know every answer to every question like, “How did the Power Puff Girls know my phone number?” (Power Puff Girls will call Summer when she is potty trained, wink, wink). They will be amazed at how you cooked such fluffy pancakes, and they will just love the way you microwave those frozen taquitos, which they will think are the best because you warmed them up.  They will cling on to you when they feel scared because they know you can make all of the scary things go away with just a prayer (while you wear your superhero cape, of course).  Actually, they will cling on you just because you are their very special mommy.  They will love going to the park with you as you soft toss their first baseball/softball because they will think you were once the greatest athlete that college ever knew.  They will whisper all of their secrets in your ear, and they will share all of their discoveries with a sparkle in their eyes. 

You may not feel like it, but you will be the star of their show.  You will be what they want to be when they are grown.  You are their example of how an incredibly amazing person should look, act, speak, and laugh.

You may not be perfect, but they will think you are.  They will be blind to your faults and defects.  They will be oblivious to your hang-ups and failures.  They will not care if you had a past because they will think you were created the moment they were born just to care for them.

Love them fiercely.  Love them all the time, continuously.  Love them when they make wrong decisions.  Love them as they grow and fall and fail.  Love them when they’re asleep.  Love them with words ALL the time!  Love them with actions even more!

Teach them to love, to forgive, to respect, to be compassionate, to care, to help, and to be humble.  Teach them that the world does not revolve around them.  Teach them to put others first.  Teach them to share and give of their things, their time, and themselves.  Teach them that man does not live on bread alone….

Enjoy and cherish every day, every thing about your babies.  Don’t allow time to slip you by because it is one of the things you will never get back or make up.  Don’t allow opportunities to fade into the should-have.

One day, when they are teenagers, they will think they have figured life out and they will begin to see how wrong you are.  They will not think you are funny, but rather embarrassing.  They will figure out how little you know of the world and how much more they know.  They will reject the lunch you carefully prepared for them after their long hours of practice, just because they are upset with you.  They will roll their eyes when you try to strike a conversation with them, and even ask you NOT to participate in future technology because it is for young, cool people.  They will give you a mean look when they are on the phone and you call out their name for dinner.  They will want to listen to their music through their headphones when you are all in the car and ignore your comments.  They will want to play video games instead of doing life with you.

Love them anyways; it will be the only way they know how to be when they grow up.  Continue to be their supermom; though to them its just child’s-play, deep down they need it.  Continue to sing loud and dance silly when they are around, deep down they love it.  Continue to forgive them, because it is how they will learn to forgive you when you fall short of your supermommy status.  Continue to teach them, they will continue to learn throughout their life through your examples, they just don’t know it yet.  Continue to press on to the end goal, never give up on them.  They will catch on. 

One day, when you go through this, you will cry.  But your cry is not for the pain your own children bring you, though there will be plenty of those, but for the pain your own parents felt at this point of their lives, and no one was there to tell them it would all turn out ok.  Just as you will feel that you will always need your parents, so do your own children, they will not admit to it during their teenage years, though.  And sometimes through their young adulthood years.  But like the prodigal child, they too will come back to you.  Just pray.  A lot.  It’ll be the only thing to keep you strong and to keep you loving your unlovable teenagers.  Not because you don’t want to love them, but because they don’t want to be loved by this amazing, never-ending, messy and sometimes sloppy, supermommy love.

With so much love for our own children, I can’t imagine what loving a grandchild will be like, but when I find out, I’ll write you another letter.  Then maybe, together we can do something right in our lives.  In the meantime, along with your spouse, seek and love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Love you forever,

A mature and new creation in Christ, Bea