Dreams, Reality and Playing House

This isn’t how I thought it would be.  I have been fooling myself for months now but the truth of the matter is that I am not what I dreamed I’d be.  I don’t even know where the dream came from, it certainly wasn’t something I planned as a child while I played house.  You know the game where you pretend to be grown up and have a husband and children and do important things all day and order your friend around because she is the one who came to your house to play instead of the other way around?  Yeah, that game.  Well, what I wanted for my life didn’t start as child’s play it came much later than that, after life actually starting happening.  But I am getting ahead of myself, let’s go back to child’s play.

You see when I was younger I envisioned myself as a Corporate CEO, rushing through the streets of NYC, attending late dinner meetings and commanding boardrooms with views of the Empire State Building.  It started small, playing “office” more than I played “house”, and never thinking that I should learn how to cook, clean, or change my doll’s diapers.  I can’t remember, did I even have a baby doll?  I always thought I would be a career woman.  Of course I wanted to be married and have a family but those were secondary to my dreams of busting through the glass ceiling.  So upon entering college I had my sights set on multiple years of school with multiple degrees to go along with it and somewhere along the way getting lucky enough to have someone to share it with.  Well that someone found me a lot faster than I ever anticipated and with the rush of love came a new vision for my life, one that was similar to what the other little girls wanted when they played house.  My new dream was evolving (I even think at some point it became a calling) and all of a sudden it was all I could do to keep up with the dreaming and excitement of playing house for a second time.  This time there were new rules.

Now a days my version of house is real – as in we have a mortgage on it – but it isn’t all about ordering people around and getting the happy ending.  This version of house is more about the people than who gets to be in charge. Two little people and another very handsome big person who live with me in this house and more than anything I want to be home with them and for them and most importantly home when they are home.  But I can’t.  At least, not as much as I would like to be.  Here in lies my problem with dreams for your life, no matter what they are or when they were formed, expectations often times lead to disappointment and we never quite get what we envisioned.

So now in a cruel twist of fate, for two days a week I am the woman, or some semblance of her, that I dreamed I would be when I was a child.  I get dressed up, I go to staff meetings, I meet with clients and I have three higher education degrees that hang on the wall of my own office.  For these two days a week I am a career woman.  But can I tell you something?  I don’t think I want to be.  I want my new dream, the one that came with that handsome guy and the two beautiful babies.   I just want to be at home and be a Mama, but I can’t right now.

And this is what is so ironic to me, I get the best of both worlds, I am getting what I wanted as a child: a chance to have an influence on others and bring in money for our family; and what I wanted after my life changed for the better when I found love and someone I actually wanted to make a family with: being home with my children three days a week, going to play dates and snuggling before naps and bed and understanding their cries and whines and tantrums more than any other person in the world.  But come next week, when I leave the house to go to work I will leave them in the care of someone other than my husband and that makes me officially not a full time stay at home mom and (I’m sorry if you hate me because I only have to do this twice a week or you think I am crazy because you would give anything to get out of the house and go to an office and have adult conversation but) this is such a loss for me.  The loss of a desire, a dream, a vision.  The loss of how I thought things would turn out and for right now this dream has a chapter called reality that is so hard to read.

The cold hard truth is that reality is hard and some people get one that seems as if everything is coming up roses while others are obviously getting the short end of the stick.  But one thing I have learned through this season of our lives is that perception is not reality. It does us no good to make commentaries on our own lives based on our own perceptions of others.  That is a never-ending battle that I or you or anyone else will never win.  I am exhausted from trying to keep up.  My perception of this arrangement for this season is that it will be hard, and I am sure that some parts of it will be, but my challenge is to not be consumed by that.  My perception is that I am scared of not fitting in with the other stay at home Mom’s anymore because I have to work and this will cause others to feel sorry for me.  My perception is that my children will be dramatically affected by this and will cause them to have wounds that they shouldn’t have.  My perception…is just that:  A perceived thought of what is to come.  The reality is that I don’t know.

Even though my dreams aren’t coming true for me in this scenario, I’m not going to stop dreaming or stop having goals for my life.  What I am going to do is stop trying to figure out the dream before it ends.  That’s like reading the first and last chapter of a book; sure you know how it all turned out but you missed all the good stuff in the middle – character development, secondary story lines, the rush of anticipation when you want something good to happen but you just have to keep reading in order to find out.  Those things make the ending, whatever it may be, that much more satisfying.

 

Tracy Carson is a Licensed Associate Professional Counselor, a wife to her Prince Charming whom she has been married to for 9 years and a Mom of two precious boys, 4 and 2.  Tracy has a passion for helping women feel beautiful inside and out and works hard in her faith based counseling practice, Professional Counseling Associates,  to encourage her clients to feel the freedom to be comfortable in their own skin.  She specializes in the treatment of eating disorders and counts it a privilege to come alongside of women as they overcome the stress that can come with new life transitions.  You can contact her at tcarsonlac (at) gmail (dot) com or find her on the web at https://www.pcaaz.com