In just under two months, I will be both due to give birth to my little one, and turn 35 years old. It is funny how different being pregnant at 26 and pregnant at 34 can be. On New Years Eve, I began to experience intense contractions that have kept me in bed, and feeling a little uneasy. As my body is getting ready to welcome this little being, it is also experiencing things like sciatic pain, gravity and the inability to get myself up once I have sat down like never before. I have loved every moment of this experience, but I have to admit that doing this the third time, and 8 years after the first time, has left me laughing at myself on more than one occasion (and has certainly provided entertainment to my family as well).
Having had some time to sit and think these last few days, especially now that the holidays are over and life is returning to “normal”, I have been focusing on some of the ways that life is changing, both for me as a woman entering her mid-thirties, and as a mother who is going to go from parenting 7 and 5 year old independent children, to adding a newborn into the mix.
I think that this time of year naturally brings out some of both our hopes and our fears of the future, and as my husband and children and I have been talking, I realize that I still have an awful lot of dreams for this life that I have been blessed with.
When I was growing up, my teachers always complained of my daydreaming. I was certainly the one person you could count on to drift away during geometry or chemistry to a different land, and I did so rather purposely most of the time. I loved to think of the life “waiting” for me once I was released from the daily monotony of high school, and entering into college was everything I had hoped. Life seemed to open up, and the possibilities for what I could be seemed so endless.
If there is one thing that I can still say about myself, it is that I carry the dreamers attitude with me everywhere I go. I still hate being confined into any kind of monotony, and I believe that no matter how old I may get, the adventures will never cease.
I am not one for resolutions on January 1st, I always feel like making a list of things that I want to change for some odd reason seems to set me up for more failure, so instead Joel and I come up with a dream list each year for the lives that we want to lead. Some dreams are for the near future, “I dream of hiking Canyonlands with the boys” Some are more down the road, “I want to see Rhythm of The Home turned into a book.”
I like to dream, and I like to dream big. I believe that what makes me a happy person is my desire to live out the wacky and sometimes unattainable dreams that I have come up with through the years. Some people may look at my life and feel like I have been all over the map with who I am, or what I “do”, but for me, it is what has brought me the most amount of joy.
I studied comparative religion in college, I worked in finance, became a yoga teacher, have been a doula, a retail store owner, a yarn dyer, an online magazine editor (I think that I am going to stick with this one for a long while to come), etc. I dream of owning a joint yoga and art studio back home in Northern California. I want to travel the globe with my family, and teach children the value of artistic expression. I want to create sewing patterns, advance my photographic skills, and learn how to throw on a potters wheel. I want to live, and I want to do so to the fullest.
I think that one place that we get stuck on the ideas of dreams is that they take us away from where we “should be”. That by encouraging ourselves to cultivate a dreamers attitude, somehow we are not living in the present. I disagree. While I think that we can not live fully with out being fully devoted to the moment that we are in, dreams allow us to keep moving forward, to journey through the life that we are capable of living. Dreams allow us to feel the full nature of our own personal journey, and to always keep us feeling alive.
In an artists group that I recently lead, we talked a lot about writing our own stories. The importance of seeing on paper the life that we have lived, and putting down into words where we want to take the lives we have been given. It amazed me to see these journals at the end of the month, and to listen to the lives these women have lead and the ones they planned on continuing to cultivate into the future.
Their dreaming was not taking them away from being successful in the moment that they were in, it was just opening up a clearer path to what they wanted to see for themselves in the future. I wish that I could show you the art that they came up with, depicting their journeys, it would blow your mind.
I think that a lot of us come to our blog spaces to dream, and to dream big. We look to each other to see, not through jealous eyes, what life is offering to others, and how creativity, art, and expression is opening the doors to living more fully. We come to these spaces to write our stories, so that someone else can see that we too are living the dreams the we set for ourselves. We are determined to not live quietly in the shadows, but to express ourselves in every way possible, to say that life as women, as mothers, as artists, as dreamers, is fulfilling and joyful. To make sure that history records this new generation of women who can find balance between the present moment, and the amazing opportunities that life always holds for us.
Life may be really different today than when I was a young pregnant mother just beginning to dream of the possibilities of a family, but it is no less exciting journeying through this experience at almost 35. I see as many possibilities for this child as I did for my oldest, and in fact, I think that the time and the wisdom (dare I say) that has come helps to expand the dreams that I have for myself and my children.
We deserve to dream. To dream big.
Happy New Year.
You can read the We Deserve This entries from 2010 here
