When all is said and done, we will complain about the changes, victimise ourselves in a sleepless state and pine after out old lives, yet we will do it all again. Because watching yourself reborn into the child that is yours, watching them watching you, refines your idea of satisfaction. Raise children so that your life bloats, expands and fullfills itself ten fold as they age. Small pleasures of cigarettes and late nights traded for the incomprehensible beauty and innocence of your offspring. Lambs tied in a bow and softness of the clouds. Sweet dreams personified in fat cheeks and untouched soles. There was a before and an after, my twenties and my thirties, entirely different but how lucky we are to have both. I am a woman and I am a mother. I had a past, and now we have a future. It will not all be for the children. I will have to find myself in there, too.