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TO SHOW CHILDREN HOW TO DREAM

More than once when I’ve wanted a girlfriend to go somewhere with me or do something, I’ve cavalierly said, “Just get a babysitter.” Or, “Why can’t your husband watch them for a few hours?”

When my friends didn’t give in to my pleading, I just couldn’t understand why. It seemed so simple, so straightforward, especially since we could all rattle on about the importance of “taking time for ourselves.” Yet with ample opportunity to get away for a few hours, these women declined to do so.

Then one day, while serving as the director of public relations for my church in Greater Boston, I received a call from the Washington bureau of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). When reporters wanted to meet with members of my church, it was my job to make that happen. The BBC called on Monday and wanted interviews on Wednesday. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been a problem, but I was on my way out of town. I needed to delegate the task, but to my surprise I found it extremely difficult to do. I felt guilty for imposing on another committee member. After all, she was busy too. But I also felt fear—fear that if I didn’t do “my job,” my identity would disappear.

Each of us has an identity, probably several. These identities are ways of defining who we are—daughter, sister, mother, wife, doctor, investment professional, etc. Although we are each many people, so to speak, we typically have a primary identity that’s related to whatever we spend most of our time doing. Because most of my past two decades have been career-focused, my identity is centered on myself as a worker. When I get stuff done in the community or workplace, I shore up my identity. In turn, when I delegate or give away those tasks, I feel as if I’m weakening that identity.

The paradox is that unless I’m willing to let go of some of my can-do identity, there isn’t room for me to develop other pieces of myself—like the mothering piece of me I wanted to develop. (This piece was, by the way, part of the reason I took a leave from my Wall Street career.) As H.G. Wells said, “You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.”

I believe each of us confronts this paradox at one time or another. In order to find another piece of who we are, we may need to discard a little bit of who we are right now. In confronting this conundrum, I have found this metaphor from Alyson Jenkins, a stay-at-home mother living in Japan, quite powerful.

Alyson Jenkins: Be Your Own Batman

One of my dad’s friends always said, “What’s better than one Meidell?” My sister and I would grin, shouting in unison, “Two Meidells!” In our small California town, I was Brooke’s little sister, one of Pat’s daughters, and Mr. Meidell’s youngest girl (although people often thought my dad was my grandpa). I knew where I belonged, but my life felt solely defined by my relationships—by being someone else’s something.

Moving to a new town as a teenager and later going to college in a different state was an opportunity to develop my own identity, but when I married and eventually had children, I felt my identity again slipping. I’m no longer Brooke’s little sister, but I’m Mackay or Grant’s mom or David’s wife. Even before I married, because I have a master’s in clinical social work, my life was focused on helping others, pushing for social change. While I love and cherish all of these roles, they’ve made it difficult to develop an independent identity—to be my something.

Thanks to Whitney’s inspiration, thinking about being the hero of my own journey has really changed my life. As a woman and social worker I am, by nature and by training, a helper, like Batman’s Robin. It’s been easy to be someone else’s something. But realizing I can also be Batman—my something—has been life-altering.

I’ve never felt like a hero. No single-bound leaping here. However, when I look back on my past through this new lens, I see small acts of heroism. My first Batman experiences were leaving the city of my birth, going to college, obtaining degrees, and getting married, to name a few events.

Before all this hero talk, I would have said it ended there. Now I think that was just the beginning. Learning to be my own Batman began in earnest after having my first baby. Being a stay-at-home mom to a newborn was frustrating and, truth be told, a little tedious at times.

I looked to the women around me to learn something new. Judy taught me to knit. Ann taught me to sew. Stacey showed me the art of bookbinding. Heidi passed on her knowledge of jewelry making, and I did end up selling my jewelry to boutiques. I taught myself to cook. I researched recipes and tried out new foods. And with some inspiration from my brother, I ran my first marathon. This was all just in the first year. When I look closely enough, I see in my actions small, Batman-like heroism, acts that helped me find space in my life for me.

As women we often identify heroics with the rescue missions we orchestrate. Who else but us can fly in and whip up a healthy meal from the paltry ingredients left in the fridge, complete with hors d’oeuvres and dessert for the friends who drop in? Who else can negotiate with insurgents to rescue an ill-fated art project from the grips of devious younger siblings? We can encounter and restore order to a flooded laundry room and fix an unintentionally broken lamp. In my Robin “helper” world, this is a typical Monday night, but it’s my Batman moments that provide the fuel.

I love being Robin, riding along in my husband and children’s sidecars, championing all their efforts to move forward, but when I also see myself as Batman, with my husband and children riding along in my sidecar, I’m happier, so much happier and, not coincidentally, a much better Robin.

As Alyson teaches, when we learn to become both Robin and Batman, we open the door to our dreams, and not coincidentally, we open the door to our children’s dreams as well. We need to recognize that, in addition to the fear of assuming new identities, we must also consider the guilt, guilt that we are somehow being bad when we do something for ourselves. Elizabeth Keeler’s dreams have taken unexpected turns, from piano performance major, to a Master’s degree in English, to her current pursuit of an MBA. She shares her mixed feelings of guilt and exhilaration as she has moved from one dream to the next, sailing uncharted waters.

Elizabeth Keeler: Confessions of a Cliff-Jumper

I don’t like extreme sports and I secretly despise people who fling themselves off cliffs in the name of leisure. I take paranoid care of my body. But, sometimes, when I ponder my life, I think I might be living my own version of insanity—call it “vocational cliff-jumping.” My secret resume includes things as disparate as “pianist,” “lab chemist,” “dancer,” and “businesswoman.” I am constantly jumping headlong into the deep end of some new professional endeavor. Let me further damage my credibility: I have moved twenty times to thirteen cities in four countries in three continents attending six universities in ten years. Peripatetic, you might say. “Geographic fix-it-itis” my friend’s mom diagnosed. “You think moving from one thing to another will fix everything.” I imagine the people speaking at my funeral saying things like: “She was confused.” Or, “A nice girl, but her internal compass was way off.”

I often question myself as I embark on yet another life change. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I stay put? Confusion and self-doubt have been a part of every transition. Last year, as I was contemplating forging ahead with my MBA, the questions started again: When and where will I find my bliss? This time I got an answer, and it shocked me. You are living it, the voice came from deep, deep inside me. Pause. Light bulb. With sudden clarity I knew I was living my dream in total perfection: I am a self-decreed explorer. I envisioned myself wearing a captain’s hat as I steered my lone ship across the tumultuous waters of the Atlantic.

While I admit there is fear associated with doing something outrageously new, fear is not my greatest deterrent to risk taking. My past life as a musician was like a lifetime vaccination against fear. I have yet to do anything as terrifying as play a Bach fugue for Professor Engle, who was known, on occasion, to mime cutting off my head. I may experience terror frequently, but it’s more like an old, pesky friend. No, my greatest deterrent, by far, is guilt. Guilt has accompanied every life change I’ve made. It’s as if there are voices telling me that changing makes me fickle, weak, or abnormal. Perhaps it’s the age-old view that incontinence and irrationality are bound up in my femininity. Changing my mind is weak, a modern-day instance of fainting in my corset. The proper thing to do is to be still, stable, responsible. Don’t change, don’t move, be dependable, be who you’ve always been, be found in the same space as before. Sometimes guilt is justified, but I have searched my soul about the wrongs of cliff-jumping, and I believe the guilt is ill-founded. If I had acted in perfect accordance with my inherited social conscience, I would be living in rural Canada celebrating my twelve-year wedding anniversary with my husband, cows, dogs, and kids. That may be right for some, but it would have been wrong for me, a sure recipe for socially-guilt-free misery. So what’s the deal with my guilt? Perhaps there are evolutionary reasons for the guilt of adventure, but one thing is for sure: the flip side of the guilt-coin is stagnation. To me, that’s the real danger. I asked Google and it confirmed my suspicions: “The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. [She] may avoid suffering and sorrow, but [she] simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live.” (Leo Buscaglia)

So, while I am perplexed by the guilt, ever-present as it is, the Captain in me insists I sail in spite of it. This week’s expedition was to enroll in the advanced private equity class offered next term. As a classmate graciously pointed out, it’s laughable how little business I have being there. However, what I know from being an experienced jumper is that after terror comes exhilaration, and if I’m lucky, ecstasy—the ultimate reward. To be clear, I am not promoting that people change jobs every year for the rest of their lives (heaven forbid). I am merely shamelessly advocating headlong, plummeting, frontier-busting, head-shaking, free-falling adventure, however that looks, because it’s worth it. I don’t know about you, but I intend to keep up my dirty little habit of cliff-jumping for a very long time, even at the risk of a confusing epitaph on my tombstone.

Women often think of themselves as a safe harbor, especially within the context of family life. But it’s just as important to be a ship, especially one that can navigate new territory. When we leave the dock and seek our dreams, we can better teach our children, our friends, our colleagues how to navigate the world.

AVOIDING AN UNLIVED LIFE

In the film adaptation of Susan Minot’s novel Evening, the main character, Ann Grant, is on her deathbed. A flashback shows her in her early twenties, during a time she believed she could achieve all of her dreams, which included having a happy marriage and a successful singing career. As the flashbacks progress, we learn that Ann’s life, in the words of famed psychiatrist Carl Jung, was “unlived.” She married badly two times, and her singing career never materialized.

Ann’s daughter Constance tries to live her mother’s unfulfilled dream of having a happy marriage; ostensibly she has, although her demeanor suggests otherwise, and she completely neglects following her bliss. Meanwhile, another daughter, Nina, fails in four careers (including a stint as a go-go dancer), and both happiness and meaningful relationships remain elusive.

When Ann left her life unlived, her daughters unwittingly tried to live it for her. Ann’s daughters became the keeper of her dreams rather than of their own. Carl Jung wrote, “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on . . . children than the unlived life of the parent.” It doesn’t have to be that way.

When Ann is asked to single out a moment of true happiness, she vividly recalls a rehearsal for a singing gig three decades earlier. As Ann sang, five-year-old Constance sat with her mom’s accompanist. In that moment Ann was attending to both of her dreams—her relationships and her singing. She was happy.

Attending to multiple dreams at the same time is certainly harder than attending to one or the other. But if by multitasking our dreams we can enable our children to keep theirs, isn’t it worth doing?

MULTITASKING OUR DREAMS

We can see positive effects of multitasking dreams, of alternating between being the ship and safe harbor in the life of Nan Hunter, and the founder of a joyous, child-centered private school that began with staging a play in her backyard in 1968.

Nan Hunter: The Dreams That Didn’t Wait

In 1962, my husband urged me to come up with an “after the children (grew to be eight children in thirteen years) leave home and you don’t have anything to do” life plan. I promptly began to think, and in about two days I had a dream. I would start a children’s theater where children learned how to act and had the joy and pleasure of giving the gift of performance to their friends and neighbors.

It’s 1967. We’re in San Jose, California, with three little children. We live in a little yellow house on Whitemarsh Court in a neighborhood full of young families. Somewhere in the gene pool of life I received the energy gene for about ten people. Today’s noted child-watchers describe this as hyperactive.

However, this energy gave me the drive to turn an idea into a dream and a dream into a do it. Summer was quiet, very quiet. Why wait until my children were grown to begin my drama school? So I wrote a simple play, made up some songs to familiar tunes, and in our backyard in 1968 I held my first drama workshop with twenty neighborhood children.

That fall our first child entered kindergarten and I began the journey of looking through the wise eyes of a mother at what happened in those big places called schools. To my dismay, schools didn’t focus on children. They looked at programs, measured progress by testing, and taught a limited curriculum consisting of math, reading, and social studies. They had gifted programs for the gifted, measured by their abilities in math and reading and thinking skills. Rather than picket, storm the fort, or burn down the building, I thought, “Someday I’m going to start a school.” For thirteen years I shared this dream with friends, teachers, and family. Many laughed, smiled their upside-down smiles, and tried to discourage me.

“You’ll never do that, Nan, you’ve got too many children.”

“Don’t you think you should just stay home and take care of what you’ve already got to do?”

“Where will you ever find a place to do it?”

In the eyes of the public I looked pretty disorganized and more than a little fractured. Their doubts doubled my determination to do it and in my heart I KNEW MY DREAM WOULD COME TRUE.

It’s 1981. Our last child enters kindergarten. In December, the San Jose Unified School District announces that they will close nine of their campuses at the end of the school year, one of which was Henderson, five minutes from my house, a peaceful little neighborhood, a perfect location.

It was time.

In February of 1982 I sent a press release to the San Jose Mercury News announcing that a busy mother of eight children was opening a school that fall. One hundred hopeful people called. I had perma-grin all day.

There were no buildings, no books, no teachers, and no uniforms. But over the next six months families poured into our bare living room and sat on folding chairs as I painted the picture of a school where there would be “Gifted education for every child, because every child is gifted.” This dream school included drama, art, science, and foreign language beginning in kindergarten.

I interviewed teachers, and promised them jobs. I picked out a curriculum and ordered books that I didn’t have to pay for until school started. Two weeks before the promised opening of the school I signed a lease for what would become Almaden Country School. Parents paid full tuition in advance, so we had the money to lease furniture and pay for the books.

Opening day in September of 1982 is still bright in my memory. One hundred ninety little boys and girls from kindergarten to sixth grade marched onto our shiny campus dressed in gingham jumpers or navy shorts and light blue shirts. Our teachers all wore gingham aprons and there was a bright red apple on every desk.

For twenty-eight years now, we have produced about twelve plays a year at Almaden Country School. I have directed or produced “A Christmas Carol” at least twenty-five times in our little auditorium. I also hold Grandma’s Camp Summer Theater with my thirty-five grandchildren.

My next dream is to have a theater for the neighborhood on our farm—which I am in the process of building. You’ll find me there at Christmas with snow and sleigh bells, surrounded by urchins, ghosts, and the spirit of Christmas Present, and dreaming with my grandchildren.

In pursuing her dreams, Nan Hunter has not only modeled for her eight children how to achieve their dreams, she has created an environment in which thousands of children are learning to dream.

ATTENDING TO RELATIONSHIPS AND OURSELVES SIMULTANEOUSLY

As I read Nan’s story, I thought of one of my favorite children’s books, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, a book not coincidentally introduced to me by Nan’s daughter Kathleen. Written by DuBose Heyward and illustrated by Marjorie Flack in 1939, the book begins with the sentence: “We hear of the Easter Bunny who comes each Easter Day before sunrise to bring eggs for boys and girls, so we think there is only one.”

Following are a few lines from the story that illustrate why we need to dream for ourselves, why we need to dream for our children, and how we can attend to our dreams while also attending to our relationships and ourselves.

We dream because dreaming is who we are. In dreaming, we teach our children how to dream.

LETTING OUR CHILDREN DREAM

As parents, we sometimes struggle to remember that our children are creatures independent of ourselves and that their dreams are not always the dreams we might have for them. Kristine Haglund, who holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in German literature, experienced this process of acceptance with her first son, Peter, whose dreams are very different from her own.

Kristine Haglund: Through the Mist of Expectations

I remember watching my firstborn son sleep. Despite the haze of exhaustion that blanketed my fragile consciousness, I didn’t want to miss a single one of those newborn sleep-smiles. I remember feeling pangs of—what?—jealousy? betrayal? when his eyes flitted back and forth under the blue-veined lids. He was dreaming, his infant neurons visiting worlds I could not see. I intuited, though I could not have given words to the feeling, that he was leaving me, continuing the long farewell that began the moment his tiny, slick body escaped mine.

My own grief at that first agonized separation was the part of motherhood that most surprised me, that surprises me even now when my delight in the unfolding of my children’s personalities is shadowed by the sometimes desperate wish for them to stop, to please, please wait for me, to keep holding my hand, to let me come with them. And the sweet longing to enter their dreams with them has, I fear, an uglier shadow side—I want them to stay with me in my dreams.

As a child, I had vivid and specific dreams about the family I would have when I grew up. I was a musician and would-be conductor, so I planned to have ten children: a string quartet, then a pianist, then a wind quintet. All their names would end in “yn”—Megyn, Justyn, Robyn, Eryn . . . (what can I say? It was the 70s!). I filled an old lesson planner from my mother’s days as a schoolteacher with elaborate practice schedules—I drew up plans for a dream house with shared bedrooms for the children, a big reading room with no furniture but bookshelves and giant pillows on the floor, and three practice rooms at the far corners of the house so that all of this practicing could happen simultaneously. I read up on Crock-Pot cooking because I knew that after-school time would be very, very busy (all of the children would play at least one sport and be heavily involved in church and community service, too, of course). I wish I were exaggerating!

I was slightly more sane by the time I actually became pregnant, and first trimester nausea made me think that, really, the Brahms horn trios are very nice, very nice indeed . . . But it still remained the task of my first baby to help me let go.

Even before he was born, he had his own agenda. I had to be induced twice, because he would come in his own sweet time. We had planned to name him Benjamin, but his father and I both knew the instant we saw him that his name was Peter, a name which was on neither of our short lists, and which we discovered only later was the name of my great-great-great-great grandfather. He was teaching me the lesson I needed most of all—that every child is a miraculous being, who comes (in the gorgeous words of Stephen Spender) “from corridors of light where the hours are suns/Endless and singing.” They are no more my creatures than the flowers or mountains or oceans are mine. As I fell in love with him, he taught me how to love, how to make safe space for his dreams and share mine as gifts rather than wielding them as weapons.

As it turned out, he has an autism spectrum disorder, and my calendar was filled with doctor and therapist appointments instead of music lessons. His dreams are of tools and gears and gadgets and impossibly complicated machines (once I found him curled up in bed with a pair of bolt-cutters!), and he hates to talk about them almost as much as I love, love, love to talk, talk, talk about mine in florid detail. The bridge between my dream world and his is tenuous and rickety—the winds blow hard between us, and we both stumble a lot. But sometimes, on clear days when love burns off the mist of my expectations, I catch glimpses of his horizons, more beautiful than I could have dreamed.

Kristine expresses so beautifully that when our love for a child overrides our expectations, we can bridge the divide between our hopes and dreams and our child’s. I also firmly believe that when we get on with our own lives, leaving no part of our lives unlived, we are better able to allow our children to live theirs. I’ve experienced this in my own life. Here’s a story from my parenting annals, written when my son was ten:

“Mom, why are you discouraging me?” asked my ten year-old with frustration. Within a day of auditioning for a local play, and not yet knowing if any of us would be cast, I found myself saying, “You know, David, there aren’t very many parts for boys your age, so don’t be disappointed if you aren’t picked.”

The words had just tumbled out, and rather than my son finding what I said comforting, he asked why I was being so unsupportive. After all, one of our family rules is “Johnsons support each other.”

“But, but, but . . .” I began to defend my words to myself, I’m just trying to protect him. I don’t want him to be disappointed. Really? Protect him or protect me?

“Mom, why are you discouraging me?”

Here I am, day after day, continually encouraging everyone I come in contact with, especially women, to “dare to dream.” But to my child I say, “Don’t be disappointed if you aren’t picked.”

If I’m saying things like that to my children but not to my friends and colleagues, the problem must be at least partly about me. To paraphrase Tolstoy: When it comes to family, we sometimes don’t know where we end and others begin.

That makes me wonder: Did my mother say such discouraging things to me? (And her mother to her, and so on down through the generations?) When we heard our parents utter some variation on the theme of “don’t be disappointed,” did any of us hear “I love you”? Or did we instead hear, “I don’t believe in you. I don’t really think you can do this”?

Fortunately, I had the opportunity for a do-over just a few months later when David wanted to go to a casting call for the PBS show Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman, an Apprentice -style program featuring ten- to fourteen-year-olds. I knew the odds of his being chosen were small. Not only were about 350 kids auditioning, David had just turned ten. If I were the casting director, I would want the cast to skew older, not younger.

But because I’m learning, I didn’t say a word. It was so hard. I had to gate the words that wanted to tumble out, begging to sally forth, as if they were caged dogs eager for a run. But I said nothing, and I went one better. Instead of saying, “You might be disappointed,” I said, “David, I’m happy you’re figuring out what kinds of things you like, and that you took the initiative to go after what you wanted.”

We might not have heard words of encouragement from our parents, but we can do things differently; the children in our lives can hear these words from us. And, oh, will they ever hear them, because mum’s the word.

Abigail Adams wrote, “O Blindness to the future kindly given that each may fill the circle marked by Heaven.” When we dream our own dreams, rather than sending messages to our children about ourselves, and quite possibly our unfulfilled dreams, we can patiently be blind. In allowing them to focus on their own lives, we are trusting that our children will “fill their circle marked by Heaven.” Rather than living through our children, we can become witnesses to the lives they choose to live.

DREAMING BY EXAMPLE . . .

You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

—H.G. Wells, nineteenth-century English science fiction writer

What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.

—Henry Ward Beecher, nineteenth-century clergyman and abolitionist