cacophony

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Henry David Thoreau

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I have been hearing that question, it seems, forever. People started asking me (and, I imagine, most everybody else) when I was very little. Certainly much too little to have a reasonable answer. When you’re five, you don’t have even the tiniest inkling of the real world of opportunities out there. But still, I had an answer. I wanted to be a teacher.

That answer changed over the years. I went through phases, as I imagine every child does. There were times when I wanted to be a doctor (a pediatrician, to be exact), wanted to be a singer, wanted to be an astronaut, wanted to be an archaeologist, wanted to be . . . . I could go on and on. But those things were just phases, things that caught my fancy at some point. They were never things I was driven to do.

Somewhere in my growing up years, though, I found some real dreams. I discovered the things I was driven to do. And one of them was that same thing I told people when I was five years old — I wanted to be a teacher.

My mother said she wouldn’t pay for me to go to college if I was going to be a teacher. So I packed that dream away and studied chemistry, and then went on to graduate school — and I woke up one day and realized “I really want to be a teacher.” So I went out and did it, and making that happen was probably among the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done.

I also always knew that I wanted to be a mother. It took me what feels like forever to get there — many if not most of the people I went to high school with had babies in their early 20s. I did not get pregnant until I was 26 and had been married for 4 years. At the time, it felt so old. Now I am turning 31 in a week, and I still have only one child. This is not where I expected to be in my life. I always assumed I’d be done having babies by the time I was 30.

What farce it is to make plans like that.

But even though my family is not as I pictured it, I am a mother; and it is just as big, as much, as I thought it would be. It is, I say repeatedly, what I was born to do, and I can’t imagine anything more right.

But. I don’t think I’ll ever be content if “mother” is all that I am.

The final dream I remember having in school was being a writer. I desperately wish, even now, that I could make my living writing. I call myself a writer, and I do write. But I’ve never made a cent from it. That probably makes me nothing but a filthy liar calling myself a writer, but I’m pretty comfortable with that. Still having one dream, though, that I haven’t achieved? It pushes me. It makes me want to push myself so that I can get there, so that I can say I have accomplished all my childhood dreams. I got a typewriter for my eighth birthday from my parents so that I could type my stories. My father used to tell me that my writing was his retirement plan. I was SO passionate about writing as a high schooler — it makes me embarrassed that I’ve never published anything, that I’ve not done any serious writing since high school. (And the stuff I wrote in high school is . . . . bad. I reread some of it recently, and I was appalled. I can only hope than in the intervening decade plus, I’ve gotten better at it.)

But I’ve grown, too, in the many years since high school — and I can’t say how thankful I am that this is true. (I have heard many people say that high school was the “best years of my life.” It has always made me sad to hear that, and as a teenager I feared that I would be one of those people — and I found the thought frankly terrifying. I am so very thankful every day that my life has not turned out that way.) I have added some new dreams — and they almost all center on one common theme.

I am driven to create. I want to be a photographer. I want to be an artist. I want to be a master knitter. I want to be a bookmaker. I want, I want, I want . . . I want to take this force that is inside, that pushes at me and makes me so discontent, that pulls at me until I want to scream with the power of it, and use it to bring new things into being. There is so much in my head, in my spirit, that I struggle to find expression for — and these dreams, these desires, are among the strongest I’ve ever known.

I have a huge new dream — I want to get an MFA, in one of three areas — book arts, photography, or creative writing. The most likely of those three is photography, and it would make me over-the-moon happy. This is a crazy, impractical, probably impossible dream — it would essentially be throwing money away, I’d have to find a way to make my life work around it, I may have to get another undergraduate degree to even get into a program, I may not be accepted to a program even if I did have another degree, and and and . . . there are so many reasons NOT to pursue this dream.

And only one reason to do so — because I WANT to.

I don’t think that’s a big enough reason.