am I a grown up?

 When was it, I wonder, when I became an adult? Was it when I had my first child, was it when I paid my first utility bill? Was it when I apologized for saying something horrid and really meaning it?

I know that I am an adult, but have I grown up?

Have you grown up? Have you "put away childish things?"

 I have decidedly NOT put away childish things, yet here I am all "grown up." Well perhaps I am grown up. Perhaps. But often I see myself as a child who still wants to dream the dreams of a child, dreaming about things I should do, projects to create .

Then, then I wonder,  amidst all the dreams I have, I wonder if I will ever decide on what I want to be, what I want to do now. What way should I steer my life.

 Now that my boys are off to school, I know that my life is slowly taking on another form, one that longs and pines, but for what, exactly, I am unsure.

Over the course of my life as a little, a child, I had so many imaginings (sometimes my mother would say I had an over-active imagination). When I was a Little, I was so very engaged in the magical world of pretend that I couldn't help but dream of the woman I would be, the Young Beautiful Woman I would be when I grew up. I couldn't help but imagine and dream that there was a path that I would find. A path, MY path that would lead me to this BECOMING of who I am, a path that would lead me to who I was meant to be. I believed in a higher purpose to my life, I believed that I had a meaning and a calling to my life that I would someday understand. I was sure, someday I would find the dream that fit just so, and there it would be. I would find this dream and unfold it to see what it was and live it out with purpose and love, because it was a dream made just for me. I always thought that I would be able to just pick it up and place it on my shoulders and BE the woman I was so meant to be.

I think when you are in the dance of the littles, the dance of childhood, you permit yourself to dream a bit more, dream a bit bigger. Dreams that you have when you are a child are dreams that you don't mind chasing.

Whenever I return home to the place where I grew up in Denver, when I enter my parent's house and cross the threshold of the door, I find that I always remember those dreams that I chased down the block, across steps and stoops, through backyards and alleys. They were dreams under bushes, and in trees and caught up in piles of snow. Caught up high in the cherry blossoms of spring or lifted up on the top of the snowman's hat in winter. They were dreams found in the wintery blizzards of winter and they were dreams caught up in the heat of the summer. Sometimes, I find, that these dreams chase me down in the here and the now, and find me in unexpected places.

Dreams of me as a ballerina, dreams of me owning a farm and caring for chickens and geese and horses and feeding wild deer, dreams of me lying in my bed, watching the snow fall outside, wishing it could always be this pretty and still and warm in the house and crisp and cold out side. Dreams of holding my baby dolls and wondering what it would be like to actually be a mom, to hold a baby on my hip and iron her clothes and brush her hair and care for her & love her so. I wonder about those dreams I had as a child. Pretending and playing and dreaming.
Dashing around our neighborhood I thought I would fill up every one of my dreams.
 Dance in the Nutcacker, sing in Annie, be a mother, a homemaker, a farmer; Be an author and and an artist.

I could dream when I was little and the world was.just.so.filled.UP.
  Filled Up with opportunity and hope.

XXOO