As many of us young women are beginning to seriously contemplate what we will be doing for the rest of our lives, we are hit by this whopping realization: we are adults.

We are the people who are going to begin to run the world. It’ our turn to take over, and the Baby Boomers and Generation X-ers are passing the torch to us Millennials. We are the ones who will be taking the calls, buying the lattes for our superiors, saving the lives of patients and teaching the future generation their basic algebra facts.

How did we get to this point? Here I am, going over the rest of my general education requirements and figuring out what I should go to grad school for, but it feels as if just yesterday was the day my mother watched me walk into my kindergarten class with tears in her eyes.

Ma,

First of all, I couldn’t have gotten this far without you. I may insist that I am all knowing about everything in the universe, but the truth is that I am just beginning to learn the basics.

I cannot remember the hospital room in which you gave birth to me and I cannot remember when the doctor handed me over to you and said, “Congratulations, you have a beautiful baby girl!”

I cannot remember the first time you held me lovingly in your arms and listened as I took my first few breaths.

I don’t know (yet) know what it is like to have a small human handed over to me, and accept full responsibility for that human’s life.

You do remember and know all of these things, and I am sure they came into your mind many different times.

You watched me walk out the door to the bus for the very first day of middle school, knowing that they were going to be the most awkward and uncomfortable three years of my life.

When I came home from school crying because of the pressure the prettier, more fully developed girls so unknowingly held over me, you hugged me tight and reassured me that even though it seems like such a big deal at the time, it wouldn’t matter in a few years.

You helped me get ready for my first school dance, knowing how nervous I was and how worried I was about the possibility of having my first slow-dance with a boy.

Then came the tougher, angst-filled teenage years where I snapped at you, told you that you were just out to get me, and gave you the cold-shoulder anytime I didn’t like what you said to me. You loved me through it all, though.

You watched as I had my heart broken, knowing that I was holding back the tears because I didn’t want you to know that you were right.

There were so many times in my life where I wanted to give up. You were there to yank me out of bed and say, “Honey, get up because we all have things to do!”

You helped me see how I could be and do whatever I set my mind to. You gave me a tough-love mentality where you were honest and told the truth to me, even when I did not want to hear it – and that was the most important time to do it.

To all of our mothers:

I speak on behalf of the daughters of my generation when I say that we are both scared and excited to begin to really contribute to the working world.

We want you to know that even when we seemed so unappreciative toward you, we knew what you were doing and why you were doing it. Or, at least we know now. We are the strong young ladies we are now because of you. Even when you didn’t think so, we want you to know that you were the driving force behind our success.

No one else in the world knows us better than you do. No one else in the world is going to display to us the raw honesty and compassion that you have shown us.

We know how lucky we are to have had someone to catch us when we fell. More importantly, we know how lucky we that you stepped back, when the time came, and watch as we fell and taught ourselves how to get back up.

We don’t know what it’s like to be you. Not yet. We can only hope that one day when we become the mothers, we can be like you.

We lived inside of you for 9 whole months. There will always be a part of you inside of us. This is especially important now that we are growing up. You have trained us for years to be headstrong and classy and now it’s time to put those skills to the test.

You have taught us to not back down and to tackle this “adult thing” with everything we’ve got.

We are going into the “real-world” (whatever that means) full-force. You’re going to be the first person we text from the our office on the first day at our very first job. You’re the first person we’ll call when we’ve had a bad day, and we’ll seek that advice you gave us many years ago; that at the end of the day, as long as we know we have done our very best, we can go to sleep peacefully.

Thank you for being our mothers, and not our friends. Thank you for not telling us what we wanted to hear, but what we needed to hear.

As we leave the years of childhood and adolescence behind, we want you to know that we are nervous. We are entering a world we aren’t familiar with. Just like the first day of kindergarten, you’ll let us go and watch with pride as we walk through (or in some cases right into) the doors of adulthood.