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"  First, it was my prom dress. Then she returned my high school soccer jacket. Now my mom has handed over a big box full of photos and mementos from my teenage years, as though she&amp;#039;s systematically ridding herself of my youth. Yet as I sifted through all the stuff I&amp;#039;d saved up, I saw my teen years entirely differently than I had before. And frankly, I like me better now. I&amp;#039;m not sure why my mother felt I needed the manual for my mo-ped, which I sold when I got my first car in 1984. But now, I have it. And a coursage from my homecoming, some New York Cosmos game ticket stubs, Cliff Notes for Thoreau&amp;#039;s Walden and a homemade autograph book from summer camp filled with people&amp;#039;s names I no longer recognize. It&amp;#039;s my youth in a box, and I find it a little disconcerting. There&amp;#039;s a shoe box of slides I took during my high school French class trip to Paris. While the shots of the Arc de Triomphe would make nice prints, I&amp;#039;m not exactly sure what I&amp;#039;m going to do with photos of a bunch of people I don&amp;#039;t talk to anymore. Nor have I searched for them on Classmates.com or Facebook. When you&amp;#039;re busy with your kids, it&amp;#039;s hard enough keeping up with the neighbors you run into every day. There are shots of me playing soccer for my high school where I&amp;#039;m apparently oblivious to the unattractiveness of a part down the middle of my permed hair. There&amp;#039;s one of me on New Year&amp;#039;s Eve in my bulky Benneton sweater, jeans that tucked into my oversized white socks and a hat I probably thought was ironic. And then there&amp;#039;s the letter, created with a dot matrix printer, from a high school friend who, I now see, was desperately in love with me -- a fact I clearly missed, or probably, ignored. Thank God we didn&amp;#039;t have blogs back then, or I wouldn&amp;#039;t be the only one to see how hard I was on him. As I sorted through all the stuff of my youth, I couldn&amp;#039;t help but think that I like me much better now. The me in those photos, letters and postcards from Paris was clearly insecure, looking a bit too much to outsiders for approval and direction. But it&amp;#039;s hard to find your way through life on a bus in the Loire Valley with a bunch of other insecure teenagers with parts down the middle of their perms. My teens years weren&amp;#039;t the good old days. These are. Now at least I know who I am and what I want out of life. I care less about what my peers on the bus think, and more about how I feel. When I make a decision, it comes with decades of experience behind it and a confidence that I didn&amp;#039;t have -- couldn&amp;#039;t have -- back when I wore ice-washed jeans and white high-top Reeboks, like everybody else. So, I&amp;#039;ve pulled out the letters from my grandparents, who passed away years ago, and a few photos of college pals I still keep in touch with, and closed the box back up. Later, I&amp;#039;ll put it in the attic, effectively ridding myself of my youth until the day I need to be reminded that these are the good old days. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a22016/i-like-me-better-now/?src=shelter_footer>