Show your dreams who’s boss

What we want for our daughters is simple: we want their dreams to come true. We want them to be safe, happy and appropriate in public, and we want them to take life by the tail. It scares us to say it sometimes, because we want to send them through life in bubble wrap. But when we have the courage, we tell them to shoot for the moon.

In a courageous moment, I wrote entry #197 of the book Do Your Laundry or You’ll Die Alone:

SHOW YOUR DREAMS WHO’S BOSS.

Sometimes when we dream big, we scare ourselves. We look at what we declared in our biggest, truest moments and decide we were thinking too big. After a string of bad days, we begin to think of our dreams as taskmasters or hard-to-get lovers, and we concoct reasons we don’t really want them afterall. For shame!

Your dreams are at your beck and call, and don’t ever forget it. Their job is to serve you, inspire you, pull you forward, and keep you from eating that third brownie. Make them toe the line.

I could have left it at that, but a mom’s job is to impart wisdom, balance and a touch of schizophrenia, so I followed up with this contrasting reminder, entry #198:

IT’S OKAY TO OUTGROW YOUR DREAMS.

The dream house of your childhood would not hold your wardrobe today. And the dream job of today may come to feel like a prison sentence tomorrow. What you hope and work for will change as you do, so don’t hold too tight to resolutions you may have outgrown. The true longings of your heart: to flourish, to love, to explore, to create … will always be part of you. Grip them loosely, and they will float along beside you, just enough out of reach to keep you interested.

Let’s teach our girls the difference between  giving up because they’ve changed their minds and giving up because obstacles are in the way. Let’s teach them that they, and they alone, get to hire and fire their dreams.