Dreams Really Do Come True

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you. Psalm 32:8 NIV

One of my earliest memories is of playing in the tub, throwing letters out at my grandma for her to reorder in her mind and tell me if I had spelled a word. I loved that game as a three-year-old and was thrilled when one of my combinations turned out to be something. I vaguely remember trying to play it again with her, but she told me, “No, now you have to know how the letters can go together. I’ll show you.” And then flashes in one last memory. I’m coloring pictures of a book I’ve dictated to my grandma. I think it might have been about a bunny because I also remember that I learned how to draw a bunny in preschool. All very vague.

But from almost my earliest memories, I’ve wanted to be a writer. In kindergarten I began a story in my journal, something along the lines of, “Look What I Found in The Water,” and in the baby Moses trope, a lady finds a baby floating in the water and takes it home and falls in love with a guy whom she meets somewhere, and they suddenly are a family. In first grade I would make book after book to win prizes in class. In fourth grade I entered a poem at the fair, something about the “Stars being bright on this wonderful night,” about stargazing with my dad. I have notebooks and notebooks of stories—never finished stories, but in six grade I had one at least twelve typed pages about a heroine named Kate, and something about a stary night, and I’m sure it was romantic, since I was hopeless back then. Not to mention poems, and essays and vignettes.

I chose English as my degree at the Air Force Academy because it was the only one that didn’t make me panic. Taking Russian, chemistry, calculous and physics all together is a good way to fry your brain. So, to survive getting a BS, I took English, the classes that helped me relax and ones I didn’t have to stress over. Which I did of course but I enjoyed this stress, piecing paragraphs together like squares in a quilt. The process is beautiful—watching ideas zip together and form themselves—and suddenly as you struggle through writing and rewriting an idea—voila! You have a pure concept. Essays. I miss those too.

I’m also a reader. I’ve read voraciously since as long as I decided reading wasn’t impossible sometime around first grade. My love affair, I think, it with words.

I’m boring you with my history for a point. Often times you can look back at your life and notice a pattern, things that show up over and over. It could be a good, bad, or neutral thing. The pattern I have is words. In distress or joy, I read and write. But I also think, that maybe if you look back and see a pattern, you might be able to see that there is some design in you to do something with that thing. For me, my secret dream, was to be an author, a writer—to have my name in print. I was so sure of it, that upon a long separation at the age of six or seven, I begged a family member to buy my book when they saw it, even if it was a hundred dollars.

But there’s this too. Doubt. You look at your own treasures, whatever they are, and you’re afraid to let them loose, especially before swine. I don’t know if you’ve experienced great success and great disappointment in parts of your life, but I have. I thought I’d be a stellar athlete but in college I was barely above mediocre. I thought I’d be a career woman, but didn’t love every moment of it, longing instead for a family. That’s true for parenting too. I thought that I’d be fantastic at staying home with my children, but that proved stressful for me, as I need to recharge my batteries with people who talk, and it's hard to get that. How little did I achieve any of my expectations. So I held on to that one thing, that one last thing I thought I might possibly be good at. I held tightly on to my words.

It's also a little big arrogant to be a writer. You have to be arrogant enough to think what you have to say is worth someone’s time to read. I didn’t ever have that confidence, and when grandma would ask me if I’d written my book or I would come to her and tell her I just couldn’t write anything because I had nothing to say, she’d just pat me on the shoulder and tell me it would come. This is significant, because she must have said it to me at least three, if not more times, and I believed her. I trusted her. I always knew that one day I’d find something to say that was worthwhile for people to read. But it took a long time to come to a place of knowing something so deeply, of coming through the other side to understand where it is I’ve been and to be able to point the way out of it.

I started writing again after my children were three and five. I had gone at least five solid years of not writing much—unable to write much because I was emotionally and imaginatively exhausted and suffering from two bouts of postpartum depression. It was writing that helped bring me out of this really deep low.

The first things I started to work on were fundamental to me, and I worked through some questions of being lost and found, of finding forgiveness and redemption. These poems I thought were to be my first book, but that never really took shape like I thought they would. It isn’t quite time for those.

Then I began to write about being a mother. I will write about this more in another blog post, but it matters to this post because I discovered a way through my angst. I finally had something worth saying, and hopefully worth reading.

I dreamed about becoming a writer, but in my writings I had always, even from the start, dreamed of becoming a wife and mother.

See, dreams do come true. I just didn’t understand that I was living my dream until I worked through it with fingers poised on the keyboard. Sometimes the thing you think you’re dreaming about isn’t the dream at all, or only a partial part of it. Sometimes it takes a cathartic process to bring you clarity.

And suddenly, I realize that my dreams have come true. I am so thankful for this book of poetry, “Motherhood: The Crucible of Love.” I’m thankful because its process brought me through dark times, to show me that being a wife and mom and having glorious and wild and imaginative children IS my dream come true. I’m thankful because it showed me my own heart. I’m thankful that I wasn’t alone but felt the Holy Spirit whispering to me as I wrote, guiding me through some deep emotions. I’m thankful because I know there might be other mothers out there who need to know that there’s hope in the middle of diapers and miss-matched socks.

Yes, Grandma, you believed in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. I kept your faith in my heart as a tiny candle of hope. And it took some time for it to fan into flame, but I am thankful for your words that have brought me here. I’m only sorry you won’t get to hold the book in your own hands.

Look back at your life and find those things you treasure and are afraid to expose because you might just find out they’re not treasures at all. I was afraid. I am still afraid. But I am finally ready to take the risk to find out if my words are worth something. Take a chance. Be ready to spring when the opportunity arises. When the moment is right, dreams will come true.

Leave a comment and share what your dreams are and if they have been fulfilled in life, or if you’re still longing. Just know there is still time. While there is breath, there is hope.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, plans to proper you, and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future,” Jeremiah 29:11 NIV