Dear 18-year-old me,
I know you’ve just met a guy you really like, a guy who likes you too, and you want to put your focus solely on him, but you need to focus on college too. And you need to finish college before you get married and have children.
I know what you’re thinking, and no there will not always be time to finish. Now is the best time.
When you’re 21 you’ll become a mother.
When you’re 22 you’ll get married.
At 23 and 25 you have more children.
By 32, you’ve been divorced twice. You’ve tried to finish college for more than a dozen years, and you’re struggling. You have a very demanding, more than full-time, work schedule and you’re a single mom. You’re having a hard time trying to be everything and do everything.
On Tuesday, for instance, you had a poetry analysis on Walt Whitman’s epic “Song of Myself” to complete and your son had a nosebleed as soon as you sat down to start work on it. Oh, and it was after his bedtime, too.
And right now? Well, you have a literary criticism on Gulliver’s Travels due in about five hours and one of your children is sick and belligerent, one wants to show you the splits and a finger she thinks is sprained and the other needs help with homework. The psychological analysis of Gulliver’s survival instincts won’t write itself.
So, you see, there’s not always time. And when there is time things happen. It’s inevitable.
Plus, the kids you go to school with were born the year you graduated from high school and that makes you feel really old and out of place.
Get it done. Preferably before you have children, even though you wouldn’t ever, ever trade them. Your 32-year-old self will thank you.
I'm Echo, a 30-something single mother of three, student and news editor. I have been blogging since 2001 about my trials and triumphs with life, love and motherhood. 
I would have the exact same open-letter to myself. I don’t regret my son at all and I would never change having him but I wish that my 19 year old self had gone to nursing school like she wanted to. I went back to school as a single mom and finished my bachelors degree when my son was in elementary school and I hope that the sacrifices I had to make and how hard I had to work left an impression on him so that he will go to college and get his degree after high school before getting married and starting a family. Keep up the good work! I’ve been reading your blog since your oldest was little, you are a great mom!