My Children Made me This Way

It’s a simple word, a universal concept, and something that none of us do often enough. We tell our children to do it. We want them to dream, big lofty things with wings and no limitations. But do we give ourselves the same expectations? As parents, do we dream enough, dream our own dreams. Things for ourselves, not things for them. Where do they end and we begin? Do we get so caught up in being parents that we forget that we are people as well.  How do you teach someone to dream when you do not do so yourself.

I ask these things with an insomnia addled mind, at 6am when I haven’t slept yet. I ask them after standing in my doorway watching the morning light filter golden to green through the trees of my neighbors yard and dapple on the street in front of my house and thinking I hadn’t noticed the way that the stones in my walk glitter in the morning light. I used to see those things. Always. When did I stop noticing them. Did I begin to stop when I became a parent? Have I become nothing more than someones mother?

I know that many will say with indignant snorts that it is. And I should be so lucky as to define myself as such. How dare I question. But I do. I do because I used to dream and I think I have stopped. I used to imagine and think I have forgotten how. I used to notice whimsical things, like sparking stones in my walk, and now I am not. Did I give up me for them?

I know that it is a common thought that that is what being a good parent is. But I don’t think so. I think you have to retain some of yourself, because if you don’t you begin to define yourself by the accomplishments of another. And even if you did help to bring that person into being, is that a good idea? People balk at the idea of being defined by a spouse, a lover, their family, their own parents. Why are we as parents expected to be defined by our children.

We all need to be our own person. We all need to have things that define us as individuals. We all need to learn to dream more, and to dream well. We are teaching our children to be independent people, how better to do that than to be strong in our own dreams and selves. Dream. Something just for you. Selfish, and sweet, and beautiful, and make it so tangable that you can almost taste it. Dream. That is the best way to teach them to do the same.