tonight as i sat with amelia while she fell asleep, wild thoughts accosted my fragile, exhausted mind.
thoughts about our future. thoughts about my dreams and aspirations for amelia's future.
i had always pictured my life (since before i can remember) as a wife and a mom with a little house with a white picket fence and a dog. nothing fancy or special, but i wanted something i didn't have a lot of in my formative years: stability. the sense of being able to say where home is and to go there after a long hard day. sure i had nice houses and was always well taken care of, but where we lived changed often, especially as i got older and life got complicated. i wanted amelia to have a sense of continuity in her education ... not moving from school to school like my brother and I did...
but tonight as i sat by her bed and watched her breathing slowly as she fell into a deep sleep, i realized that maybe i was wrong. not wrong to want stability and a good life for my daughter, but perhaps... just perhaps... i could be wrong about what that stability should look like.
do i want her to be safe and comfortable in her community of friends and small town life? or do i want her to be comfortable in her own skin, sure of herself, of who she is and what she wants out of life? do i want her to have a solid education without any gaps or do i want her to be educated, cultured, by experiences like travel, making new friends, trying new things?
i don't want to move around always trying to find the next best thing, always dissatisfied with where I'm at, never content. i want to learn, and eventually be able to teach and pass on the skills of being content in all situations, of adapting to new situations and being flexible with all life throws at us. i want to learn how to be a good traveler in life's journey and for my daughter to gain a love for adventure and an appreciation for the beauty and diversity in our vast and yet small world.
maybe this realization is really just me letting go a little of my idea of how things should be, a shedding of my old dreams and hopes for my family and an embracing of a new and possibly better future. we can't move forward until we've let go of the past. this is me. letting go. moving on. it's the best i've got and i'm praying it's enough.
