The stuff of my dreams

My husband and I have a New Year’s Eve tradition that I love. We stay in, make dinner (it used to be a fancy 4 or 5 courses, but this year we copped out and ordered take out sushi) and we… talk. Yep, we chat. We look back on the past year and discuss our favorite moments. We recount our struggles and what we learned from them. We set goals: personal and professional. We see how we did on the goals we set the prior year. We travel plan: dream up the trips we’d like to take in the coming year, pull out our calendars, and make it happen.

These past few years have differed from our first years together. We’re a family of four now; no longer DINKs who lose count of how many flights they take in a year and make milking the last available vacation hour into an art form. The most surprising thing about this all? I’m okay with it.

I was old enough when we had kids that I was both as realistic as one can be about how my life would change, and I’d already accomplished a ton of things I wanted to do. I’d earned a doctorate degree. I’d traveled to Europe, Canada, Mexico, Africa, Asia, South America, and all over the U.S. I sang with a choir. I took up sailing. I wrote two books (unpublished as of yet). I learned French. I quit my job and went on an extended European vacation. Three times. (Wow, I sound flakey). I laughed, cried, and partied with amazing friends. I ran a marathon. By the time I got pregnant, I was okay with slowing down and having it not be all about me anymore.

I was speaking with a writer friend not too long ago and I told her that while I had once dreamed of writing full-time, I was now okay with writing when I could fit it in. That I was so busy with my kids it was hard to find time for writing, and I couldn’t park myself in a coffee shop and write away the hours like I used to. She became sad for me, believing a dream had died. But that wasn’t it at all. It’s just that the dream no longer fit me.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal, written by Katy McLaughlin and entitled New Dreams, When the Old Ones Don’t Fit. That’s it, exactly. The dreams I had as a 15-year-old certainly didn’t fit the 20-year-old me. The 20-year-old dreamer had no freaking clue what 30-year-old me would be like. And pre-marriage, pre-child me had some really great dreams, but it would be silly to cling to those simply because I was once determined to make them happen. It’s not giving up, it’s evolving as life marches forward, without trying to manipulate and control that which cannot be manipulated and controlled. It’s realizing that maybe full time writing isn’t for me, and being okay with that. It’s realizing that while I’d love to be published someday, I can’t hang all my hopes on such external validation; I must keep writing simply because I love to write. It’s realizing that parking myself at a coffee shop every Friday to write isn’t fun with or fair to a toddler strapped in a stroller. Knowing that walking along the Seine at twilight may not happen this year, but it doesn’t mean I’ll never get to do that again. It’s being honest about the fact that while strapping on a backpack and trekking through South America on a shoestring budget once sounded like a romantic adventure, it now sounds like a really great way to end up with a permanent back ache and no retirement savings. It’s realizing that I absolutely will see the glaciers of New Zealand and the rain forests of Thailand, it’s just not going to happen today, and it may be harder than it would have been a few years ago because I’ll have two kids tugging on my jeans telling me they’re hungry and asking if we’re there yet. It’s finding a balance between still having hopes, dreams, and goals, being willing to let the wisdom of experience play its role, and adapting when it isn’t the right fit anymore.

I still have lots of dreams. Now, most of them involve small hands squeezing mine, ice cream (because everything is better with ice cream), and a slower pace where I see the wonder of the world through the eyes of my children. The important thing to remember is this: small hands in mine were once a dream. That’s the dream I get to live right now. That one came true.