Burying Dreams

The grave digger carries a shovel.  In my mind, she walks with hunched shoulders against a grey sky.  In my mind, she has a heavy heart, so much so, perhaps, that her burdens have worn through its apex and fallen to the grave digger’s feet.  That grey-blue heart is perforated and ragged, with gaping holes.  I hear her heartbeats like gusts of defeat – weak, loud, empty, and really only suggesting a course to the air that wanders over graves, rather than compelling blood.  It’s a November sort of scene that I see when I visualize one who routinely buries stiffened and mottled flesh, pushing aside ghostly, withered leaves, and making a place to lay to rest long-loved dreams.

But another figure carries a shovel, too.  Another person, less weary, but with just as much reason to be, also  carries a dry and shriveled promise to be placed in the cold ground.  She prepares a place as the grave digger has done, presses and coaxes the earth to yield a resting place for it.  The placement is quick and the burial site marked, too, but she afterward looks up.  The sun is an April thing and leaves at her feet have been so long dead that they’ve forgotten to look forlorn.  Like the other earth-mover, she turns away and leaves the receptacle of her hopes in the cold and the dark of the ground, but she will return.  She will guard this place.  She will wait.  She will not forget, because she is a gardener.

I’m learning this about adulthood: the dreams that I cherished through my childhood, the vibrant ones to which I clung, and the visions to which I promised my heart, have, of necessity, began to gather dust.  As I change diapers, scrape dinners out of messy pantry shelves, and hurry between activities and obligations, those hopes have begun to wither.  Last October, I stole away a time or two, seizing a sunny hour at nap-time to harvest the beans that we had left out to dry for this year’s seed.  The pods crackled delicately and the beans had become white and hard.  My hands feel that way now, when I take up a pencil to sketch or open a blank word document to write.  My imagination and creativity stiffen with disuse and sometimes it makes me feel a little disillusioned, deadened. 

I wonder, but speculate that I would feel much the same way, even if these two precious girls hadn’t yet come into my life.  This disillusionment, this period of wandering is, I think, something most of us go through as we shed our childhoods.  If I wasn’t a mother, I might be realizing that the career I had chosen was not as fulfilling as I had hoped, that neither friends nor spouse nor busyness could completely stave off loneliness all of the time – that time could not be stretched or compressed enough to cradle my needs.  It’s a period when we all begin, probably never to cease, to realize that choosing the best things often means choosing the hard things and sacrificing other desires along the way.  And we do it.

When people ask me how I’m liking life, I usually answer wholeheartedly that I love it, that I’m working my dream job.  It’s true.  I am probably one of the luckiest people I know, to have all of every day to devote to two beautiful, healthy children who have more than enough energy to drain me of mine.  But there are moments, now and then, when I feel the weight of where I am and of those unanswered devotions to my teenaged ambitions.  There are times when, in spite of the work I do and the happiness it generates, I feel like a shell, and I miss the pleasures that I knowingly traded in for this hard-earned and mercifully granted joy.  I miss the exercise – the physical, mental, social stimuli and sculpting that I once thought comprised the path to becoming who I’m meant to be.  Sometimes, I feel lonely.  Sometimes I feel empty.  

The despondency rested a little heavily over me this week.  That’s a part of life, I know, so I pressed myself to move proactively through my routine.  It’s planting season and my neighbor and I have spent hours every morning in our garden plot, furiously digging trenches, tilling in fertilizer, and laying down drip lines.  Kneeling beside the row we’d designated for corn, I pressed holes into the soil with my middle finger, dropped two gnarled kernels into each, and pinched the loose dirt back over them.  Burying dreams, I thought. 

It wasn’t exactly an epiphany for me, really.  I’ve long thought of my extra-parental aspirations as gathering dust.  Atrophied, maybe, dormant, but not dead.  Still, as I thought about those buried corns, in the damp, cold darkness, it added a new color to my hope.  Yes, I will take up those dreams again someday.  I will have another chance to develop the God-given talents in my hands and body and mind, and when I pick them up again, they will be slightly wasted and wan, but perhaps they too will be changed from the last time I held them.  Maybe something will have sprouted, developed, that was not there before.  Something will be waiting to spring out of them that could not have come from my inexperienced, youthful vigor.

Right now, motherhood, and the effort to do things right and responsibly, has all but consumed me, like a hole in the earth; but I am not a shell.  I am a seed.  The life and light inside of me and the dark dampness around me, together, will do what pure sunshine and unbroken ease could not have done.  Even now, I am germinating.