I left home when I was 17 years old and I have been responsible for myself ever since. I can remember my life before having kids. I remember me, not as a mom or a wife or a daughter. I remember ME, my dreams and how I would sit there at times imagining life and what I wanted from it. 

As I sit here by the pool, watching my children play, I can almost see myself again. Not the mom in me or the grandma that I hope to be. I see me as I once was. I don't feel any older. I might feel smarter and I know I have experienced and learned a lot. But right now, I still feel as I am looking at my life through a window... everything that has happened, was something that was happening to a young girl who loved, who married, who gave birth to two beautiful children. A girl who watched people live and people die.

I've never felt the burden of life. Everything was, and is, just part of it, part of life, the life that was happening to a mom, a wife, a daughter. But  not to me. I am the same girl, with the same dreams and feelings. There is no more wife and no more daughter... The only thing left is the mom. And I am so happy that the mom I see is me.