Once I finished Where’d You Go, Bernadette? I read the next suggestion from my friend Ginna…

Here’s a short book review of What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty:

It’s good. Great, actually. It is thought-provoking, to imagine losing the memories from ten years of your life. Alice falls off a spin bike at the gym, and when she wakes up, she thinks she is ten years younger and pregnant with her first child. She doesn’t remember her three children, crumbling marriage, or anything else from the past ten years. The greatest thing about the book is her journey to find herself, combining the woman she is at 40, and the woman she was at 30. There is heartache and pain, but also grace and redemption. I flew through it, just needing to know what the next page said.

Now that you’ve got the synopsis… I’ll tell you this: I’m not quite yet 30, but it made me brutally aware of how much can happen in ten years. Obviously, the last ten years of my life (aka my twenties) were vastly different than my thirties are going to be. My twenties consisted of college, partying, traveling, job searching, falling in love, getting married, and birthing two kids. My thirties will be full of raising toddlers (read: potty training), choosing schools (and running the chauffeur service to get various kids to various places), doing laundry, hosting holiday get-togethers and getting to know my kids in every stage of their lives. I can’t imagine waking up halfway through my thirties, and not remembering anything about it.

But on the other hand, what would I want to be the same? Which things would I want to wake up ten years later and know would be consistent? My marriage. My relationship with my kids (no matter how old they were). My friendships. My place at my church. Those would be my priorities, if I had to choose something to be consistent throughout my life. Just thinking about what I’ll be doing ten years from now makes me want to focus on those things more than ever, so that ten years from now, I’ll know where I stand.

What would you think if you woke up, and didn’t remember the last ten years? Would you have wanted something to change? Would you like where you stand?