It Sucks to Grow Up

10 years seems like an impossible amount of time to imagine/predict what or where I will be.

Let's reflect, shall we?

10 years ago...I had just turned 15 and finished my Freshman year of high school at Broomfield High. I started working at my first "real" job as a hostess at Kaddy Shack, which served Tennessee barbeque. I couldn't drive, I didn't even have a permit. The car we teens (Holly, Stef and I) rode around it was "El Jepe," which is Spanish for nothing probably but it was a 1991 plymouth Sundance, white with peeling paint and doors that wouldn't open. We climbed in and out the windows and felt soooo cool doing it, for some odd reason. The speakers didn't work all the time so when we came to bumps in the road, Holly especially would tend to speed up because sometimes the speakers would be jostled into working and we could blare our music extremely loud.

This is what it looked like. But with less paint.

Just so you have an idea of how "emo" I was (or wasn't), here is a song that Holly and I would listen to at the max volume and sing as loud as possible as we drove with the windows down.

I went to the my first concert without my mom and not really with her approval (she let me go only because Adam, my brother, was home on leave and came with us). It was New Found Glory with Something Corporate, Finch, and Further Seems Forever at the Fillmore Auditorium in Denver. It. Was. Awesome.

Holly, Stef and Me when I was 15. Summer 2002. We were so cool.

Fast forward 10 years...a lot has happened. Many things I didn't expect, like the loss of my Gramps in March of 2006, getting into and out of a couple of relationships, then finding my One and Only 2 years ago, having a baby!!!!, watching someone I love live through cancer, loving my neices as much as I do...good and bad, things have changed.

So...how do I say where I want to be in 10 years? We're still trying to figure out what we are going to do with the next year of our life, let alone 10.

I asked Hondo where he wants to be in 10 years and his response was, "Rich."

Typical.

Monroe will be almost 11 in 10 years. When I was 11, I kissed a boy for the first time. Yikes.

I hope that in 10 years I don't live in Utah anymore. There are some great things about this state, but there are some things that I really don't love. I would like to raise Monroe in a more diverse community, in mutiple senses of the word.

I would like to have my graduate degree, maybe even a Doctorate, and be working in something that I love, instead of working for the sake of working.

I would like to have a better car...mine is 12 years old now, if I still have the same car in 10 years please take apart my engine or something so I'm forced to buy something else. Or do what Holly did with once of my favorite pairs of shoes...throw it away without telling me.

I would like to still be happy, and to have taken some risks. I don't feel like I've taken many in my life so far.

I pray that 10 years from now we are still healthy, happy, and that all my family has the same fortune.