Flashback to 7th grade. It's 7 a.m. on Monday morning. You wake up to a gentle knock on the door, and your mom greets you with a smile and asks you to start getting ready for school.
“LEAVE ME ALONE!" your 13-year-old hormonal-grouch-of-a-self screams.
After a significant amount of dawdling in your bed, you get up at the last possible minute, idle through your morning routine, and make your way downstairs.
Your mom greets you with a fully cooked breakfast, your backpack and lunch ready to go, and begs nicely that you put on a coat as it's a cold, harsh winter day.
Rather than a nice, “Oh thanks for your concern, Mom, I will," you reply with “stop treating me like a baby! I don't feel like it," in a tone even colder than the morning temperature.
You make your way to the car in which your mom already has running and heat blasting, an act she took the liberty to do 20-minutes earlier in her pajamas facing the cold morning so you wouldn't have to do just that.
After a silent car ride to school and a heartwarming goodbye from Mom, you slam the door and you make your way to school, feeling like not a person in the world can understand your silly little adolescent problems, especially not your mom.
I have four words for you, you Victoria's Secret Pink tracksuit-wearing, side bangs-sporting moron:
You have no idea.
You have no idea your mom bends over backward for you in every way possible, even beyond a morning routine.
You have no idea she went to the mall with her girlfriends and entered Aeropostale simply with you in mind,then purchased a sweater because she was thinking of you. But instead of being gracious, you ridicule her for even considering you would wear said sweater in the first place.
You have no idea you are the one person in the world she cares about most, yet you treat her like the one person you want to be around least.
You have no idea you're are being hurtful. You are being a nightmare.
But most of all, you have no idea how much you are taking for granted, and you have no idea you're rejecting who will soon become your absolute best friend. Your other half.
Fast forward to college.
You are so excited to embark on this new journey to become an independent individual. You're so excited to learn more about yourself.
Yet after 3 years in college, perhaps one of the most valuable things you've learned is just how much you need my mom. How you'll be calling her approximately five times a day just to hear her voice, or just to tell her what type of cereal you ate for breakfast. How you love college, but there's just about nothing better than returning home to spend a week with your mom.
How you realize that friends come and go, but your best friend is the one person on this earth you can trust most. The person you can go to for everything. The person who brought you into this earth in the first place.
And as time goes by and you get older, you become more and more resentful of that 13-year-old brat who didn't realize just how lucky she was when her mom was always there. When she woke up in the morning and the first thing she got to start her day with was her mom's smiling face. But most of all, you resent that 13-year old brat who neglected the fact that she got to see her mom every day and never had to know what it was like to miss her.
