It seems like most things eventually come around full circle.

We used to mock our moms for deliberating over curtains and comparing paint colors. Now I love finding just the right piece of driftwood, arriving at the perfect shelf arrangement.

It feels like yesterday that I was listening intently to the mom's instructions, trying to catch all the little details, worried I wouldn't be able to remember how to fix the bottle or what time the kids were supposed to go to bed.

Now I'm leaving my daughter with babysitters.  Writing directions for feeding, bedtime, how to calm her down, when to let her cry. High school girls. They seem so much younger nowadays, I think. Surely I never looked that young...

I remember hearing the woman's accent at the restaurant, irritated with her difficulty understanding my order, thinking to myself, If you're gonna live here, at least learn the language.

Now I'm the extranjera in a foreign country, the ever learning student of the Spanish language. And even after 5 years of living overseas I still get flustered and fumble through simple questions or statements I've said a million other times, trying to catch the mistakes as they come out, feeling like the fool under the smirk of an annoyed national.

Perhaps this is another interpretation of living a full and complete life.  To live both sides of the same coin means we will at some point be the child and the adult, the giver and the receiver, the prideful and the humbled.