Dreams

After contemplating the fact that this is my 10-year high school reunion this year, I started thinking back to what I used to think my life would be like "when I grew up." This isn't it. Sometimes life does not turn out the way we expect.

As a child, I wanted to be a 6'6" black man (I did not understand genetics and biology at the time). This would have allowed me to play in the NBA, thus being just like Mike. As I grew older, my dreams changed. There was the doctor phase, the lawyer phase, the teacher phase, the missionary phase, the I just want to be rich phase. But around high school I started making more serious plans. The "big plan" was to go to college, and about my junior or senior year, meet a man exactly 2 years older than me who was already well established in the business world (like my dad) and making lots of money. He would either be tall, dark and handsome, or look like Brad Pitt; I would have been happy either way. Then we would move into the suburbs, I would work for maybe 2 years, and then I would stay home with our two children (the oldest a boy, the youngest a girl). We would live in a beautiful home with 4 bedrooms, about an acre of land, and a Pottery Barn inspired decor. Life would be good.

Somewhere around my freshman year, the dream began to change. I met my now husband (that part of the dream worked -- he's definitely good looking) and after dating about 3 years, we decided to get married the summer before our senior year. This meant that we were poor. Not just on a tight budget -- below poverty level poor. We worked a manual labor job at the Recycling Center part-time making $5.75/hour while finishing our degrees. I figured this would be worth the year of misery, because after that, we would go into the "real world" and start making money and living the dream. Not so much. Aaron started PT school in St. Louis (the "scary" big city) and we lived in a "nice" 1-bedroom apartment pretty much in the ghetto. (Don't get me wrong -- I really did love my apartment, just not the drug-dealing, gun-shooting neighbors that came with it). I was working as a teacher while my husband went to classes for 8 hours a day and studied all night. Somehow that was not how I pictured my life. However, if I could just make it through 3 years, he would have a great job, we could move into a cute little house in one of the many suburbs of St. Louis, start our family, and voila, life would be good. Again, not so much.

With a mountain of student loans staring us in the face, and being "frugal" (i.e. cheapskates), we decided Aaron should apply for a military job, just to see if he could get loan repayment. We figured our chances weren't that good, and we'd just suck up the debt and move on. Nope -- we got the loan repayment, and the next thing I know, my husband is flying to Rhode Island for 6 weeks of training, I'm quitting my job and driving across the country by myself to move to Virginia to take a job as a teacher at a school I'd never even visited. (It totally ended up being the best job of my life). Well, we figured it was time to start our family, but alas, the traditional method of starting a family wasn't so, how shall we say, fruitful? After a few infertility treatments, we were ready to move on, and we started our adoption plan. The dream was to adopt a child after about a year of starting the process -- that's typical, right? Well, our lives have been anything but typical, so I'm not sure why I expected this to be the same.

5 months after visiting the agency for the first time, we got Malachi. He's amazing. There aren't words to describe how much I love this kid. He may not have been part of the original dream from high school, but he is definitely the child I have dreamed about. And he most certainly is the child that God "dreamed" for us. Interesting how God's plans are sometimes different than ours, huh ...

So, here I sit, typing this blog while my husband is halfway across the world on a big ship. I'm a "single," stay-at-home mom, still living in an apartment, in a city a couple thousand miles away from any family members. There's no 4-bedroom, Pottery Barn inspired home in the suburbs, no 1-acre yard with a tree house and riding lawnmower, not even a Christmas tree in the basement (we haven't spent Christmas at home in 3 years). But this is my life. This is God's plan for me. And you know what? I'm okay with that. Maybe God knows me better than I know myself, but I'm having a blast. I love adventure, I love living in cool places like Seattle and taking vacations during a cross-country road trip paid for by your tax dollars. I may not like deployments and playing the whole "single mom" role, but I do like the friends that I've made because of it. And I like that I'm learning how to be independent. I can lower a crib all by myself. I can cook a meal and keep my child from killing himself all at the same time. I can even wash the car (okay, so I used the automatic one, but still). And by God's grace, I get to live His dream for me, which frankly, is a whole lot better than mine was. Because you know what? I don't think I would have been content with that 4-bedroom house in the suburbs decorated in Pottery Barn decor. This is my new dream, and it's a happy one.