Twenty Years

The other day I saw a post on facebook 

asking for help to plan my 20 year high school reunion.

20?

Has it really been twenty years? 

It seems like just yesterday I was a teenager 
with dreams of what my life would be like after high school
. 

I just lived a lot of it!

Was it anything like what I thought it would be?

 On Sunday, my husband showed me this comic.

Could basically sum up my life.

 I remember, as the all knowing sixteen year old I was, looking at my mother and thinking I was never going to be like her. (Sorry mom-love ya) I was never going to have stretch marks, varicose veins, wrinkles or grey hair. I have become my mother!

In my late teens, I was living on the brink of technology. We had a word processor type writer! It was soon complimented by an archaic computer (couldn't tell you any details; I'm not techno like that). I know it had no mouse and function keys! I was a whiz at function keys back in the day. Had them all memorized, too!  In fact, one day I went to one of the computer labs, on my college campus, to print out my paper and waited until a computer without a mouse was available for I had no clue how to use one. Oh and did the research for that paper all from printed journals. World Wide Web? Yeah, that was the thing that crashed 5 times in the 20 minute presentation my professor was excitedly showing us. Who would ever use that? 

Any way, I remember trying to help my mother do some work on our computer. Bless her heart. She would write down every step and then come and ask me again what to do before doing it. I'm sure sometimes I thought  it would have been easier for both of us if I just did it for her. 

The other day I watched my oldest crank out a power point presentation for her history class. I have no idea how to do that. What took her an afternoon would have taken me days to just figure out how. Let alone actually put in the information and pictures I wanted. 

Like my mother, some how while I've been busy changing diaper, cleaning, cooking and doing laundry, technology has advanced and I find myself struggling to learn new things. I'm no longer the adored mother who knows it all (although a few of my young ones might still look at me that way-thanks heavens). It's much easier if my kids  just ask Dad or faster if they do it themselves. 

Oh well, each day I'm trying to learn new things. Some days I actually am the kind of mother I want to be. My life may not have been exactly what I thought it would be twenty years ago but I've learned that sometimes we give up ideas of what we wanted for what will really make us happy in reality. Life is fun, unpredictable and getting faster all the time.  I'm looking forward to the next twenty!