As I was procrastinating studying for my BIO test an evening before my final, I found an activity that could pointlessly take up much of my mitochondria and synapsis studying time. I went through old family pictures and fortunately or not for me, we had a ton. They were embarrassing and nostalgic. I saw in awe how much time had passed and how much have I grown up. But one thing that caught me by surprise was how much my mother had changed. She had slightly different, longer, more youthful hair, slimmer figure and firmer skin. And that is when it hit me: my mother is old. For the record, this feeling was far more terrifying that when you see all your friends getting engaged or finishing law school and all those responsible adult stuff.

According to the census, most women bear children at the ages between twenty-five and thirty. Therefore, most of them reach their forties while their children go through the infamous years of adolescence. This is the age when children start shaping their personality. The way I remember my mom when I was a teenager is the way I think of her nowadays, even though she has changed. Also, I am not talking about the times as a teenager when I was so angry I could not stand the way she breathed. In my mind, she has always remained forty years old.

Let us face it, as children, we can remember our parents' birthdays, but we have to think a couple minutes and do the math to figure out their age. Whenever my classmates would ask me about my mom, I would respond to them "She is like, forty I think" and that stuck with me throughout all of her forties. Even when she turned fifty, I would still catch myself thinking she was a decade younger.

I believe it was not as much as a force of habit as it was a subconscious desire of mine for her to always stay young. Sometimes I even think that that is kind of selfish, because if our mothers stay young, so do we. However, as much as I would like to self-deprive, this is certainly not the case.

I understood I love my mom and I want her to stay young forever because I want her in my life forever, as much as I hate her criticism. I understood that when she started not being able to do things she used to do when she was forty, when she couldn't hear a lot of things I was saying, when she got breast cancer. I understood that when I haven't seen her in a year and when I did saw her at the airport, she looked like a sweet old lady. It was my sweet old lady and it made me both sad and happy, because every year she gets older, is another year I have known her and another year she has been my mom.