Being a mom is an incredibly difficult job. I know that being my mom is especially difficult. But I don’t know that I’ll ever have enough words in my vocabulary to thank my mom for the way that she raised me. As I watched and listened to my friends and classmates talk about their parents, I knew that my life was a little different. My mom not only let me be myself, but worked everyday to teach me how to be independent. At the end of the day, my mom always said her main goal was to make sure that her kids were ready to go out in the world and that they were good and kind people. She never fixed the problems that my siblings and I made but instead gave us advice and directions to fix it ourselves.

I wish I could say that I always appreciated this but when you’re an angry thirteen-year-old girl, you don’t like your parents very much. Especially when those parents are pushing for you to handle your issues by yourself.

Thank you for making me fight my own fights.

Thank you for teaching me how to depend on myself.

And thank you for always supporting my decisions.

Of course there were plenty of times where I had problems much bigger than me. Sometimes I tried to take them on anyway but more often than not, my mom was there for me. Even though she wanted me to be an independent person, I never doubted that she would help me if I really needed it. As I've grown up, I've come to realize how difficult it must have been to watch me fail over and over. Especially when I had periods of time when I would lash out at my mom for letting these things happen to me. But as I look back at my first year of college, my first year "on my own", I couldn't be more grateful to the mom who made me grow by myself.

I still call my mom almost every day because for every one thing I can do by myself, there are forty-seven things that I still don't know. She picks up every time and walks me through the steps and I take a deep breath and follow those instructions. I wasn't as nervous to start college as most people were because I knew that I had been preparing for these days all my life. Nothing about growing up is easy and I used to think that my life was especially difficult. But in reality I'm glad that I was able to learn how to be my own person and solve my own problems. I'm ready for anything that life throws at me everyday and I'm not afraid of anything anymore.