What is a Dream Come True?

...and how do we know when it's happened?

Me and Pumpkin

I’ve been thinking a lot about time and how it moves.  How the person we once were who dreamed up a life is never the same person as the one living the dream. Or not living it. What I mean: I dreamt I would live on a couple of acres and have two kids and lots of animals. Dogs, a cat or two, and a modest herd of alpacas. Yes! Alpacas. I thought I would sell their fleece for yarn.  Oh–––and be a painter. If you asked me at twenty-six, that’s what I would have said. I was already three years into my first marriage. We’d bought a small, two-bedroom home near the harbor. I’d studied painting at U.C. Santa Cruz. We seemed to be on a path.

That life came undone a few years later. I had a lovely, big-eyed baby with a chromosomal variation that meant he’d never walk, or be able to feed himself, nor communicate with us his thoughts, needs, and feelings. My marriage fell apart under the weight of all the decision-making and sleeplessness that came with this new life. Soon, I was a single mother, sharing care-giving. And then, my back and body gave out and I could no longer even lift my own son. I slipped under waves of anxiety and deep grief. Grief for my role as a mother, for the family I would never make, for the sense of possibility I’d had when I was only a few years younger. It was almost impossible to picture what might come next. Or how the story might ever become one I could carry.

Now here I am living in the same neighborhood I started in, but with a different husband and as a writer. It’s been years since I picked up a paintbrush. Writing was the even earlier dream, so it seems fitting that I returned to it when life became otherwise unmanageable. We live in a small two-bedroom house, (though we use the second bedroom as an office) and have a very small dog, a puppy named Pumpkin who brings us joy every day, leaping into the air to greet us, then grabbing her stuffed pumpkin toy in her mouth and racing down the hall. I want––and have tried–––to summon my younger self and show her how things have turned out. Or, at least, how this sliver of time is going. I want to show her that I wrote some books of poems and have wonderful friends and that my husband and dog and I walk to the beach most evenings and that I am grateful to her for not giving up on a possible life. But I don’t know what she would make of me. She wanted so many things I don’t have. She lost so much along the way.

We can never quite meet ourselves because the self we plan to meet keeps morphing into another one. You, too, must have had dreams that no longer fit you, or that you tried your best to attain, but that slipped away. It’s a rare life that doesn’t have such turns. Or you DID get the things you imagined, but they don’t feel like you thought they would. This––-the disappointment–––is a loss of innocence. We had it all figured out. We worked hard. We made choices. And life got away from us anyhow. We lost things. We failed. We were left or we did the leaving. People we love died. We didn’t have the family we hoped for, or we had an unexpected pregnancy and became parents who weren’t sure that’s what we wanted.

I’ve seen how easy it is to become bitter. Or rather, perhaps, it’s hard not to be bitter, disillusioned. But life seems to keep having new ideas, keep filling the gaps with the new: new people, new stories. Even wonder. I marvel at my life, daily. Or rather, some days it happens organically, and I am in awe of the smallest moment. Other days I practice awe by, say, sitting and watching the small birds that fill the lantana at dusk, flitting so quickly you can barely comprehend how they move their bodied from branch to branch. It turns out this is the truest dream––the most possible and marvelous –––to be in love with the world. To be able to be with it at all. To notice it and its workings from a place of love. Not that the other dreams don’t matter. I’m glad I write books and live near the ocean. Glad I’ve done some of the things I wanted to do. But mostly because of how the doing has changed me, has altered my way of being. And that, I think, is the second round of innocence; when we love the world even though we know better, even though it will sometimes break our heart. We love it because it feels good and true to love it. Because it’s what the heart does best. I like to think the heart waits for us to arrive, however long it takes. To show up, at last, on our own doorstep, dreaming of our feet planted exactly where they are.

Armando and Pumpkin