I want my baby to go to sleep. Right now. (Seriously, I’m watching her on the baby monitor as I daydream.)

I want her to nap and sleep and eat healthy food.

I want my oldest to enjoy learning about her body and what it can do in the gymnastics class I just started her in.

I want my husband to have a good day at work on most days, and to come home safely to his waiting family.

I want my girls to like school and to flourish in it, and to be challenged enough to grow, without being harmed.

I want the years to go by—watching my kids grow and play—but I want to enjoy my life as it happens, so that I don’t look back in old age and wish I had been more present in the chaos of child-rearing.

I want to take more time to kiss my husband, even when there are dinner dishes to clean up and bedtimes to be met. I want to sleep well and have wild dreams.

I want to take a vacation—a real vacation. The kind of vacation we haven’t taken since our honeymoon. I want to bring our kids.

I want to visit the mountains of New Mexico, where he earned his first Master’s degree, and I want to hike the red trails of the desert. I want to carry the baby in our hiking backpack and I want to hold our oldest daughter’s hand as she feels her legs pound and fatigue in a way she’s never felt before.

I want to sit on the front porch and drink two glasses of wine. I want to watch the sunset from our matching white rockers, the ones that we never get to sit in. I want the kids to be sweetly asleep—that hour of musky light before we ourselves are ready for bed too.

I want to read more books this year than I have in the last five since becoming a mother, to make up for the way being a sporadic reader has taken over being a voracious one. I want him to read books next to me, the kind that interest him and make his imaginative brain twirl and whistle.

I want to not want anything. I want to give up caring about materialistic things that don’t matter. “You can’t take it with you,” as they say.

I want him to have a car that is new enough to not be a burden, but old enough to be frugal. I want to be not-so-frugal with my heart.

I want to be less afraid of what will happen tomorrow and more aware of this moment, right here, before it’s gone.

I want to remind myself to love and to meet my practical, daily duties with as much eagerness as I can muster, and I want someone else to make my coffee in the morning.

And I want someone else to clean my house.

I want to believe in magic, and I want to watch my daughters grow without being so worried for what they’ll have to struggle through. I want to look ahead and believe that what’s to come is beautiful, but I want to understand that there is beauty in shadow hiding places too. I want to remember that my best qualities have often emerged through hardship, and that each of us, in our own ways, finds adversity.

I want to be less afraid; I want to be brave. I want to raise brave girls.

It’s a lot to want, but I do.

The post My Mother’s Wish List. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.