Was this what I dreamed my life would be?
You are startled with this thought in the kitchen. It is 9:37am. There is spit-up on the floor and the baby has crawled into it, trailing her fingers through and soaking the sleeves of her once-clean shirt. Your boys are fighting over the markers and have colored so hard on their papers that they are now coloring the counter. It is, thankfully, black. Your sink is filled with dirty dishes, the dishwasher with clean ones, and there are three loads of laundry to be put away.
Just yesterday someone said to you as you left church, “Before you know it, they’ll be gone and you will be missing them!” You know this is true and you already miss them even thinking about it. And yet…the dishes and the laundry and the cereal that has become glued down to the floor and the fighting, always the fighting. The baby is now eating a leaf.
You think of your early twenties, how they spread wide-open before you with one thing: possibility. You had written nothing in stone and made no commitments that can’t be broken. No vows. You try to think: if not this, what were your dreams?
And you can’t remember them.
This is the thing that steals away your breath, even for a moment as you are scooping up the baby and resolving Markergate and ignoring the dishes and the laundry. You had dreams, you know you did. They were large and they were wild and they propelled you forward with unabashed hope. But now they have vanished and what you have is this ordinary room in this ordinary house that seems, for now, to be closing in around you.
Whatever those dreams were, they were certainly not this.
The thought is heavy, saturated with guilt. The feeding baby flutters a hand up to stroke and then squeeze your cheek. Her eyes are not your eyes, but there is something of you in them as she stares up. She doesn’t see the laundry or dishes or spit-up on her sleeve. She doesn’t blink at another boy-argument, but simply looks at you. Right at you. You think of the book Are You My Mother? and how that baby bird knows when he sees his mother, even for the first time. He just knows. That is the look in your baby’s eyes. YOUR BABY. You had a baby. Three of them.
This is no small dream, even if it wasn’t one you envisioned as a small girl. (When you played with GI Joes instead of Barbie.) This is a wild dream, even if not one you hoped for in the floating free days of your twenties. (When you searched Petfinder for a great dog rather than Pinterest for nursery ideas.) This is no small dream, even when your life feels small and closed in by laundry and messes and chaos.
You wish you could remember the wide-open dreams. But it is an impossible thing, really, to compare dreams to one another, or even dreams to reality. That’s like saying green is better than the letter Q.
Later, maybe, you will try to wind back the thread of your thoughts or the straight and sure handwriting in your journals to remember your old dreams. Just to know. For now, you trace your baby’s cheek until her dimple appears. When your fingertip touches that tiny, perfect place, it has smoothed completely away like it was never there at all.
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I am linking up with my own linky party. THAT’S RIGHT. I can do that kind of thing. If you want to grow and work on your craft and build community with other writers, join in! The prompt this week is daily life.
You captured several things so well: the mess, the fighting , the chaos and the realization that dreams change. All blown away by that moment of complete connection. Praying that we all take the time to let those moments carry us!
Thanks, Carol!
I don’t know that I had any grand dreams, but I do know that I was not prepared AT ALL for the lack of self that motherhood demands. It is both good and horrible. Thanks for the reminder that those dimples are better than anything else I could have planned or hoped for…
This post is SO GREAT Kiki!! It seriously speaks to my heart – I think of that question all the time (not in a bad way, just in the way you describe, where it sort of sneaks up on you). Sometimes I think that everything I wanted growing up is what I have now… but then again what I wanted consisted of things like having a teddy bear that was real-life, and my cat likes to sleep wrapped up in my arms like a teddy bear, so mission accomplished. Other times I wonder what in the world I’m doing with life!
I don’t have any major lesson or great point to make… just that I relate 🙂
You sound so much like me. I remember those moments you described so well and with my youngest of five turning 13 (gulp!) in a month, I am now the one who can say, “yes, it does go by so quickly”. If I could tell my younger self anything, it would be to just slow down and not worry so much about the small stuff. It’s a wonderful feeling when after the years of raising children to be teens and beyond, we can rediscover our dreams again. Our dreams, hopes and aspirations aren’t gone forever and it’s pretty fun to rediscover them again.
I wish I would have read this twenty years ago–to remind me that twenty years will go whipping by a warp speed. I think I finally figured it out when the girls were 11 and 12 and I started seeing that my need for ‘me time’ was excluding them in a horrible way. I had to learn to create ‘us moments’ with each of them…something I wish I had started when they were 3 and 4. ‘Me time’ is good…just as long as there is ‘us time’ for each family member.
I really really love this post. I just found your blog from the Addie Zierman review a couple days ago, but I love your new series idea and relate so much to those moments of wondering “what am i doing here” and then learning to be thankful for where i’ve come. I recently wrote about my own re-imagining of my dreams, specifically my dream to save the world, at http://katiemurchisonross.blogspot.com/2014/01/on-saving-world.html.
Thanks for your lovely words and your story!
I remember those days so well, and the feeling that I would never pursue my dreams. We’re past that now, and my dreams have mingled into a crazy combination of old and new. Great post!
Beautiful. It’s amazing how we plan, we dream, and God remains sovereign. It can hurt but it’s also beautiful. Thank you, as always, for sharing.
You are a wonderful word-weaver. MarkerGate. Saturated with guilt. Green is better than the letter Q. Wowed.