Dreaming
Dear Dreamers,
Were you like me? Did you, as a teen, sit with your friends and imagine your “adult life?” Did you talk about where you would go to college, what you would be when you “grew” up, who you might marry, where you might live, how you might change the world? Did you picture it all in great detail, step-by-step and know that it was real?
Did you sit by the pool together and not consider the impact of the wicked sun on your young skin? Yes, you were told that you would pay a price, but no matter — you were invincible. Did you find the classroom stifling, with opened windows, no air-conditioning, the hot midwestern day that lingered on and the teachers who seemingly did not bring advanced algebra to life for you? Did you know that if you just made it through this thing called high school, your life would improve?
Did you go to college, endeavor to study, meet people who rocked your world and maybe became noticed? Did you fall in love — once, twice, three times and have your heart broken just as many? And did you listen to the sad music on your heavy sony walkman to soothe the pain and know that someday a boy would come along who truly understood you?
Maybe some wise professors brought some subjects to life. Maybe you finally realized that you had started to find your people. Maybe some authors spoke a language that made some sense.
Did you graduate to a poor economy and know that now was not your time, but sometime it would be? You pictured yourself as a journalist, an executive, a doctor, a lawyer. You and your posse would change the world. It would be your time. But first maybe you took to the road — to sit out the high joblessness rate and to consider again what your life would look like.
Maybe you spent time in the mountains, wrote some poetry, made some friends, lived on little with your entire life ahead of you. Maybe in the years that followed you married young. Maybe you remained single. Maybe you took job after job — recounting how those above you in the organizations behaved and vowed that “you would never be like them.”
You might have thought back to your original dreams from age 15 and altered your vision so that your new path fit in with your own model of success. You were earnest, hopeful, fresh-faced and free and you could start to pay your bills. You remembered that your parents told you about things like car insurance and that you would need to be responsible.
And you were.
Your friends landed positions. You lived in nicely appointed apartments in tonier sections of town. Some of you had cars. Some of you took the bus. You showed up to work on time. You were promoted. You changed companies and somehow ended up with a “title.” Maybe your early marriage fell apart, maybe it didn’t. You likely had children — this is what you were raised to do.
Likely your children were healthy. You might have had friends who were not so lucky. You knew the stories, the babies who died in childbirth, the ones who stayed in the neonatal unit. You were fortunate.
You saw footage of the third world and you felt glad to be an American. You weren’t moved or interested — not yet. That would come later. That would come when you were able to breathe, once your own kids were raised.
You thought you did mostly the right things. You likely enrolled your children in the right schools, they learned to dance, to paint, to sing and to play sports. They were of a generation that actually was color blind. Were their friends parents from the middle east, Africa, the continent? Did your kids and others speak multiple languages?
You didn’t. In your generation being an English-speaking American took you everywhere one needed to go?
Did you work long hours and not see your children enough? Did you marry a spouse who co-parented well with you? And you took your two vacations a year in which you felt like a family for that brief time? Did you sit on the far flung remote beaches of Sonoma County with other families and watch the kids frolic without fear, with unbridled optimism?
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Was September 11 two weeks later?
And then you picked the kids up from school early for safety reasons. Yet weeks later you continued to dream — that in the midst of the fear and the bloodshed, your family would persevere. That this was only another blip.
Did you tell your mother a few years later that you were so very tired? That raising children, working full time, being involved in the community and looking presentable was exhausting. That you needed more than a nap.
Did she tell you that “yes, you were supposed to do all of these things, but maybe not all at once?”
Maybe someone forgot to tell your generation to pace yourself. And maybe your second marriage went well. Of course marriage had challenges, but yours was a happy one — with laughter and adventure.
Maybe you knew that you had to cherish these years, that they would pass and someday your home would sound too quiet. But before it was silent, you really needed some sleep.
And then you sat again with your friends. Again, maybe by the pool and strategized about where your offspring would attend college. Maybe you told them that one of yours wanted to move to Europe. Maybe she said “how could you let her?” Maybe you said “How can I not?”
Yes, you knew the implications, but your daughter — like you — had her own path, and maybe this was her own life plan.
And then one day the kids were gone. Did you notice that while the world operated on the school year schedule and you could not help but think that way as well, that it didn’t register in your own life anymore? Instead you asked the kids when a visit to their hometown might work.
Maybe you had another dream of the time that you would spend together when they would cook for you, take you places, speak in other languages and be independent. Maybe that is how is happened.
And in the interim you looked in the mirror from time-to-time at your lines, your aging body and dry skin and said “no matter,” I am still here. Because maybe some of your high school pals were no longer. You still pushed yourself physically and you tried to eat right, you traveled well, you didn’t complain much. You continued to dream of the people you would meet, the stories to be told.
Maybe you thought back to the early days and the vision and maybe life didn’t turn out at all that way. You lost friends. You lost jobs. You lost money. Your kids were busy. But you had seen much of the world and all states, but one. You had traveled to third world countries. You went to hallowed ground and your prayed every now and then. Your life was good.
And then today you sit with your mother and you talk about plans. She smiles and explains how impossible it is to plan. How we are each navigating health, time and lack thereof, responsibility and commitment. And yet you tell yourself that you still have dreams. You still have mountains to climb, journeys to make, friendships to kindle.
You say “I will stay flexible, I will stay fit, I will use anti-aging cream and sunblock. I will wear a hat. I won’t give up on the dream. I know that it’s not going to look like this. I know that I will be tripped up. I know that there may be a god laughing at my plans, but I am making them anyway.”
Because that is what dreamers do.
And you can’t stop thinking about Neil Young singing “the dreams that you are having, they won’t let you down,”
Jennifer
