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.  

Right now, we are her heroes.

It's hard to imagine there will come a day when she won't think we're the greatest, when she'll disobey, when she'll be embarrassed of her parents or hurt us with her words.

I heard someone say recently that we can't fully appreciate our parents until we have a child of our own. At first, in the wake of delivery and the weeks of pieced together naps, I could only think in terms of the beating your body takes in the birth process and the sacrifice of sleep. Now I've begun to think about the capacity to love, the unrequited hugeness of what we feel for our children, and the certainty that they will stray in one way or another.

I do feel infinitely more grateful for my parents and their sacrifice. But when I am left breathless at just how big my love is for her, at the depth of what I feel for this little person who has done nothing to earn it, who hasn't thanked us for our sacrifice, I am overwhelmed by what my Heavenly Father feels for me. By how He's ached, rejoiced, wept, and laughed over me. At how undeserved it all is.