You Get to Find Resilience
letting go of what I thought my life would look like
Throughout most of my life, my dream for myself was at once both small and grandiose. I envisioned for myself: a pretty family in a pretty home doing peaceful family things, like getting along easily and having family game night in a clean house and spending quality time together. For many years before I had a family, my vision didn’t include any practical logistics of how that reality would come together. It’s not that I didn’t expect to work hard; working hard has always come easily to me. It’s that I assumed that if I worked hard in the family, it would be inside of a unit where that work felt safe, reciprocal, shared in every way.
As I have aged, mothered, married, divorced, and grown away from my deep attachments to patriarchal religion, capitalism, and the isolated nuclear family, I feel the bones of my dream shifting inside of me: I don’t feel such an urgency to chase the veneer anymore. Having lived over a decade inside of the pretty falsity we are all sold, I see all of the ways the framework is lacking structural integrity. For as long as we live in a place that both exploits and isolates people to keep the machine going so money can be made, our knees will continue to wobble on the weak foundation we are standing on.
When I look at the common dream of the (heterosexual) American family, I think everyone is left robbed with the setup we’ve been handed. Women will usually tell you they are robbed of their time and autonomy the instant children appear. Men are robbed of their capacity to be anything more than nose-down in the grind for more capital (power), often detached from their own souls. Both find bitterness and defensiveness with their losses. Children are deprived of the chance to see families in true inter-dependence and reciprocal community, gender aside. Realizing that on a large scale we aren’t nearly as close to this ideal as I thought we were has felt like scales falling off of my eyes.
Maybe it was only my experience of growing up a millennial girl, but I felt naively under the impression that women were only disadvantaged in family life “back then,” like, when our grandmothers were housewives in the fifties and expected to simultaneously raise the children, keep the house, cook the meals, emit perpetual youth and sexiness, and not earn money, or god forbid have control of that money, and not be clinically insane. I walked into my own marriage assuming that gendered issues were like…done (lolllllll) only to find that they were just more covert, and if I wanted the same ground the men and fathers were standing on, I was going to have to advocate for it. And I was going to have to do it again, and again, and again, and with a soft gentle tone, and the will to educate, if I wanted a chance to be heard.
As I have looked around my life, my mind has changed about what to dream. I was once devastated to be a single mom, and resistant to counterculture forms of income or family and home life. Very recently I wrinkled my nose at the thought of renting my guest room out to someone. Yet taking that leap has been a stabilizing move for my home, and not just financially. My kids and I love having another woman in the house. It is a pleasure to have someone here to share food with, talk to, read quietly next to the fire after the kids are asleep. Had I clung to my ideas from before - breaking away from the marketed mainstream is failing - I would have missed it.
This new dream of mine also includes growing up. Growing up, for me, means speaking up. It means realizing I’m in charge of changing or leaving a situation that has me hurting. It means not being a helpless child, but rather a woman with a voice, a will, a direction. At first, my best attempt at this (speaking up for myself) resulted in immediate, volatile anger. My anger was hot, all in flames and ripping off the proverbial steering wheel whenever she felt a boundary of mine was crossed. My tongue and tone were her tools and I was just a bystander. I would let my anger rage, and she was (and is) destructive. I enacted what I was modeled in life, until I became aware that my anger, while perhaps wholly valid, was not proving something important... It wasn’t proving to be productive. Does it matter if it’s valid if it’s also destroying your capacity to thrive?
Anyway, my new dream isn’t about the ring on my finger, or the pretty house, or the glowing family photos. It’s not about perfect holidays with my kids, it’s not about getting to look like other families during parent teacher conferences. My grief swallowed all of those dreams a while ago now. My dream instead is about the peace I can gather from being my truest self. My dream is a vision of the bravest me, the me who knows I will always have my own back, and who rests in the stillness of that steady self trust. My dream is the peace of knowing I’ve hidden nothing in my heart and they’re still there, the ones I love. My dream is a calm nervous system. My dream is a life where I can show my kids you get to keep trying. You get to find resilience.
