Dealing with Disparity

Growing up as a child and youth, I had a pretty clear perception of what I wanted my life to look like as a wife and mother. This turned out to be both good and bad for me. It was good, in that my early vision of what my life would become inspired my choices and influenced my goals. My dreams kept me working hard and striving to achieve good things. But it was also bad, in that upon arriving at adulthood, I kept measuring my personal and my family's success against my childhood vision of my mentally perceived future. Unfortunately seen through this lens, I found myself feeling both frustrated and defeated when my life didn't follow my own preconceived course at all like I had envisioned it. The result was, that I ended up holding myself, my husband, and my life's circumstances up to a standard that wasn't based on reality, and that ultimately wasn't fair to anyone.

During many of my adult years I could have chosen to be more content with my life. I could have stopped trying to measure my life's progress against my own idealistically enduring, yet clearly unrealistic standard. Even today, I am clearly continuing my efforts to become the person that the child in me is demanding that I become.

Are these happily after dreams of my youth the goals I should still be aiming for today? I have, for the most part achieved the place that I have been trying to arrive at during my whole life. After much effort, I actually am here, and it is wonderful! So perhaps, my stubborn loyalty to idealism has been a good thing. I feel satisfaction at being at a place that resembles so closely the potential future that I envisioned long ago. "Arriving" has certainly brought me much satisfaction. But a big part of the process of "arriving" actually came for me, from accepting that my life's process, which was much messier and meandering than I had once perceived that it would be, was and is okay. Accepting is also a place that I came to be, that had to proceed my arrival at the place that I am.

Ultimately, I have learned to appreciate the effort it took to get here, and also to value the meandering path through those many unexpected obstacles, that I traveled along the way. I can now see the growth that my struggles and the adjustments to my plans produced in me.

It is at this point that I understand that the complex path that brought me to the place of my vision was more valuable to me than an easy stroll down an unencumbered way would have been. It was the struggle to get here that made me what I am today.

To "arrive" has been a great satisfaction to me and I have relished the joy of it, but I also realize that I must press on from here and continue to challenge myself with dreams of new vistas. New plans and schemes, though much less clearly defined in my mind than the views of my youth, now must take me beyond what I had initially imagined. I need to create a new vision for my future that builds upon the foundation of all that has occurred in my past, and though that new vision is still being formed in my mind, I feel I am reaching a tipping point where I am ready to explore those possibilities.