Tuesday Coffee Chat

The official Tuesday Coffee Chat is back this week. Today's question is ...

17 again! If you could be any age again, for one week, what age would you be?

I would be 23 1/2. That is how old I was when I became a mom for the first time. I was so young and had so much on my plate and so many distractions ... in my third year of law school, studying for the Bar exam, building a house, making big decisions I had no business making at that time in my life, trying to obtain it all. 

But I already had it all, in the tiny little package that was Kyndal.

It took many, many years later, and a few more kids, for me to realize that being a mom was all I ever wanted. 

I wish in that one week I would have held my baby close and just quit everything else. I wish I would have had wisdom and courage to quit law school, even though I had almost completed it. I wish I would have stopped construction on our house because we couldn't afford it. I wish I would have forced my husband (at the time) to step up and do whatever it took to take care of his family financially so I could stay home with my baby full time. I wish I would have had the foresight to know that homeschooling would be so great and would have devoted myself right then to starting her education at home.

I wish I would have soaked in every single moment of her in that week and for every week thereafter. Because now she is a 20 year old woman getting ready to get married and start a family of her own and it all went by in the blink of an eye. 

I'd like to think that doing that week over and doing it differently would have changed the course of the rest of my life. I wouldn't change any of it if it meant that I would not have ended up married to Rick and the mother of Dawson, Eli and Brynne, as well. But I have to believe that knowing early on in my life as a mother that motherhood was the most important thing, that I would have kept myself from going down a long path away from the destination God had planned for my life.