Dear Younger Version of Me,

Dear 15 year old me,
  For gods sake, do not lite that cigarette. You will cough, your eyes will water and you will look like a fool. It's not worth it. Stop now. If you don't you will be a smoker for 9 years. That's right, 9 years. That enough time to have 7 or 8 children, to get a PHD, or enough time to get yellow teeth, multiple cavities, and not be able to walk a mile without wheezing and almost passing out.
   That boyfriend you love so much? The one you want to have kids with and marry and live happily ever after with? Lands hims self multiple times in jail. Drinks early in the day, uses, and ruins your friends lives. Sure he may eventually clean up his act, but why wait?
   That little girl your sister has when she is 19 years old will be the beginning for the career you will eventually have an immense passion for. She wont ruin your life, or take attention away from you that you thought you deserved. You will love her like your own, miss her like crazy when shes gone and she will repair a long broken relationship you had with your sister. Let it happen, don't fight it.
   High school is hard, I am glad you finally stopped wearing all the black and hiding behind something you weren't. You do need a relationship with god, and one day you will see that. But for now, grow your hair back out, trash the all screaming music, smile a little.

Dear 17 year old me,

  Stop Smoking! Pull your shirt up and your skirt down. You are so much better than this. You exercise to much and you eat way to little. Your new boyfriend, the one you love so much and have put 2 years into? He's cheating on you. A lot. You may think he is good looking and confident, but really he is egotistical and immature. He makes you feel inadequate. You finally come to terms with this in a few months. But why wait. Senior year will seem so freeing being single, and you will finally find out that having friends rather then a boyfriend, is so much more fulfilling.
   Your going to start drinking soon. I don't just mean here and there trying a beer your friend stole from their parents. I mean really drinking. Drinking to get drunk. Drinking to forget and drinking to get noticed. You are to young. You will drink so much after high school that you will get put on academic probation at a community college. A student with a 4.0 GPA, and you wont even be able to get up in the morning for your 9am class. You will mix pills with liquor, and have what you think is a great time, followed by a very scary episode that you probably should have died or at the vary least spent time in a hospital for. Thank god your sister is a nurse, and will rescue you. Your parents will love you harder then they ever have that night, Your mom will hold you while you sleep in her bed for hours and hours and hours,and you will move back home, away from the anxiety and ultimately to much freedom that comes with being 18. You are not a failure. But I am pleading with you, just stop drinking now.
   Oh yeah, when you go outside and see the nerdy guy across the street washing his car, smile and say hi, EVERY TIME. He ends up being your husband.

Dear 19 year old me,

   Your still smoking I see... You're family will move away from you. 800 miles away. Remember, you chose not to go with them, They didn't abandon you. So quit using that as en excuse for falling back into your old ways. Stop smoking, and i mean everything, and drinking. You curse like a sailor but I can live with that. Remember your friends that are always there for you at this age? 6 years later they still are. So cling to them, love them. Because you start to lose people you know. Really, it seems young, but people start to die. It won't make sense, but it will happen.
  Don't go to school for cosmetology, your good at it, but you ruin your feet and you and I both know it's not your passion. You're scared and you think you need a quick fix. Get your bachelors degree, So I don't have to be getting it while I'm writing this.
 Please don't keep dating these men who have addictions and no real love for you. You have curves and blond hair, that's what they like about you. Stop treating  all the nice guys like friends. Your only hurting yourself. The assholes will forget you, and the nice guys will marry someone more deserving. You will end up with a nice guy, so stop giving so much of your heart away to the jerks.

Dear 21 year old me,
   I am going to shove that cigarette so far up your...Isn't it funny that now you can drink, you don't want to? At least not recklessly. Guess you had to learn that on your own.I'm glad you made it out to Colorado to live with your family. But now you  have to cut ties. Go out and live on your own, without the social pressures of your old town. Its a new start. You are relying on your parents to much.
  When you meet your husband, try new things. He is full of great ideas and you are to stubborn to try them. Please realize, you ARE going to marry him, so stop treating him like shit for the first 3 months of your relationship. All he ever did was love you. Get over yourself. He will leave you, he almost does.
  Also, You accidentally head butt him with your tooth, which leaves a scar on his forehead. Try to avoid that. It's a funny story but any harder and he might have looked like harry potter.

   Stop looking for the next best thing. Let life happen, you waste so much time trying to get whats bigger, better, and the grass will always be greener on the other side. Do not make a rash decision to move. You do it to many times. You will regret it , and you will never know what life would have been like.
   The DJ will show up for your wedding. 1 hour late. This is when you are given permission to drink. Have fun, and embrace the day. The moment you say I DO will fly by, try to remember it.


Dear 23 Year old me,
  It will take you until the day you find out you are pregnant to fully quit smoking, 9 years. I cannot help but dread the repercussions of your decisions.
  Your brother will have a baby girl, your sister will marry the man she had been waiting for for 10 years, and your oldest sister will have her 2nd child. Life will cycle over again. You will have a son. Pregnancy sucks, lets be honest, Childbirth? I can see why people have died from it.You go back to school for your bachelors degree. Better late then never. In the end, your still alive, you could have done things a lot differently though. But now you know how it turns out. And its good.


Yours Truely,
  The 25 year old version of me.

 

Hi Sleep! I remember you...

Asher (my son) is four months old. His sleeping habits up until this point have been less the ideal. I spent countless hours rocking, singing, nursing, and walking him back to sleep every night. It was exhausting.I for some reason have an overwhelming fear that I will kill my child by starving him to death and it will happen instantly if I don't feed him when he cried. The fear mostly comes from my inability to recognize his hunger cues and all the things I read say not to wait until he is crying to feed him, that means its to late, I am to feed him when he is showing early signs of hunger with his hunger cues. So naturally I fed him every 2 hours. And when the dr said he could now sleep through the night without being woken to eat my obsession with making sure he ate enough meant feed him whenever he wakes on his own crying at night. This, in time, was going to kill me. One night I got the notion to pray. Don't get me wrong I pray a lot over Asher. But this time it was for sleep. Which for some reason I had never thought to do. He was whining and moaning in his crib, eyes closed but obviously about to wake up. Hitting himself with his crazy flying hands, flinging his feet in the air. My normal instinct would have said ok pick him up before he wakes up screaming and rock him back to sleep. if he wakes up. feed him. But this time as I was praying I got an overwhelming sense of peace about the idea of simply Putting the pacifier in his mouth in the darkness and waiting patiently for him to "work it out". Never before have I felt ok with not feeding him or comforting him in my arms. I felt like such a bad mother not picking him up. Within 10 minutes he was back to sleep. I did this 3 more times that night until finally feeding him at 5 am. Since that night he has been able to put himself back to sleep instead if waking all the way up crying. He just moans and wiggles,and I just wait clinging to the monitor until I hear that sweet sound of baby sleepy breaths. Don't get me wrong, we have bad nights still. We aren't perfect. But I think that was one of gods first lessons in parenting. I have learned that as a parent my job is to teach my child. No matter how much it hurts or makes me feel like a failure. Right down to teaching my son how to fall back asleep. Teaching isn't all fun, the rewards seem distant and futile. But all of my worrying proved to be for nothing. Asher is still alive and on good nights sleeps 6 or 7 hours straight. I don't even notice the moans and wiggles most of the time anymore. the monitor volume level is at half strength now.
Our next step? Crying it out. He cannot initially put himself to sleep at bed time or nap time. I still nurse or rock him to sleep. I'm dreading it but I know god will hold my hand and give me the tools to teach my child a valuable skill. I often forget that god is in control and I need to let go of my worrying ways. It amazes me and forever will that god is in everything we do, even down to our desperate cries for sleep. He hears them and he helps. Not just for a moment but he wants to help solve the whole problem. We just need to stop being so full of pride thinking we got this thing down. Cuz come on, it's parenting, no one has it down.