The Dream
Have you ever had a dream that felt so real you woke up and felt like you had to write it down, immediately? Have you ever had a visceral reaction to something that literally happened in your sleep?
I ask because that’s what happened to me last night.
I had a dream that I was talking to my therapist. This was weird because I don’t even have a therapist but I have been listening to Lori Gottleib’s book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone on Audible. In the dream, I guess I was meeting with her.
She began our session with that old standby: “So what brings you here today?”
And I said, “I’m not really sure. My husband made the appointment.”
This part was a direct replay of a conversation Gavin and I had had earlier that night. Gavin has been listening to the book, too, and I think he thinks I need to go to therapy. Teasing me, he said if I made the appointment I’d probably act like I didn’t know why I was there. I guess that means I most definitely do need to go to therapy.
True story.
So then she (the therapist) switched gears and said, “Tell me about yourself.”
And so I launched into this story about my life that began with college, with choosing biology over literature (because I thought it would be more challenging), applying to medical school, getting rejected, and then getting waitlisted, and finally receiving that long-awaited acceptance letter only to decide that motherhood was the path I needed to take (because challenging or not, the truth was I didn’t really want to go to medical school). I talked about spending the next two decades wondering about my destiny, if my choices were the right ones, and if I would ever truly find my way. My words were laced with disappointment.
And even in the dream I was disappointed in myself for verbalizing the disappointment to a complete stranger.
“Only boring people get bored,” is a phrase I love to tell my kids, but secretly I’ve always felt like I was the boring one. All the striving, the countless hours I spent trying to prove that the work I was doing mattered—and for what? So I could do something that other people found interesting? That other people would appreciate? That other people would validate?
If I was waiting for someone else to give me the credit I thought I deserved, I was going to be waiting a lifetime.
An Ordinary Day
But just before I woke up, I remembered watching these old home videos. And the ones I liked the best weren’t the ones with the awards ceremonies or the birthday celebrations or the recitals. They were the everyday ones, with the house a mess and the kids too and everybody just being themselves on an ordinary day.
There was this one video where I was feeding our new baby her first bites of solid food and in walks my four-year-old. He opens the fridge, searching for a snack. “Would you like some cheese?” I ask as I shovel another spoonful of cereal into the baby’s mouth. And then his little friend ambles into the frame. And there they are—just two friends hanging out after preschool on a Tuesday. It was so beautiful and ordinary. In the video, Gavin hands them a juice box, and they slurp it up and walk away. I dip the spoon into the cereal again.
In another, my daughter is at a dress rehearsal for her spring dance recital. She’s watching the girl in front of her, and so she’s a half-step behind through the entire dance, and I am laughing because we’ve joked about this often over the years. Dancing was never her thing. She’s an artist, an observer. Watching is what she does best. She paints; she doesn’t dance.
My other son is making faces at the dinner table. He’s usually so serious, but today he is being silly. He never smiles for the camera, but here he is—hamming it up as if he’ll finally annoy us so much we’ll have no choice but to turn the camera away from him. Instead, we keep rolling. He’s missing his front teeth, and he’s adorable.
There’s one of my baby girl, lying on a rug in the bathroom while water fills the tub. She is laughing and kicking her legs, and I remember with fondness how much she loved those evening baths. On extra fussy days, I’d just run the bathwater, swaddle her up, and rock her for hours on end.
They say the little things are really the big things, but those words never felt true for me. I could never understand why I felt behind, left out, out of touch, and dumb. While other people were getting promoted and meeting interesting people, I was home raising my kids. In my heart, I knew I was doing important work, but lacking the recognition, the narrative became one of martyrdom rather than maturation.
The home movies reminded me that motherhood was the part of adulthood I liked best.
And when I watched the videos, I found myself searching for the things that were just out of focus—those nuances I might have missed if I was zooming in on the subject only.
In an article by the American Psychological Association, painting teacher and landscape artist David Dunlop tells students “to stop identifying objects and instead see scenes as collections of lines, shadows, shapes and contours.” He says that by doing this, the artists’s sketches become more three-dimensional and complete.
In the dream, I felt like my pretend therapist was saying, “All along you’ve had exactly what you always wanted. And you almost missed it.”
Except she didn’t say that. Not those words. And not out loud.
Instead, all by myself, I realized that failing to notice the lines, shadows, shapes, and contours of my own life, I had internalized an incomplete picture of my reality. Eventually, it took on a shape I didn’t even recognize.
An Extraordinary Life
I woke up, but my eyes remained closed. I let that truth wash over me. I had spent the last twenty years stepping over the ordinary as if they were legos scattered across my living room floor. Instead of picking up the pieces, I walked around what was right in front of me. Miraculously, the house still got built, the kids got raised, and the marriage survived. We built the life we wanted, not because of anything I did, but in spite of it.
And for that I am grateful. As I sit here on the couch right now writing this blog post, the dog sleeps curled on a pillow by my hip. My two younger kids are playing a computer game together. My son helps my daughter study for a science test. They are friends, and they love each other. Why in the world would I wish for more when everything I could ever want sits right next to me?
Even ordinary days hold extraordinary magic.
Ready to take it to the next level?