Recently a friend asked me, through email, if I had a dream job what would it be? My response was, ‘don’t make me WRITE it.’ I’m not sure if it was understood but my answer of course was, ‘writer’. A simple but complex six-letter word. After all, I can dream can’t I?
Later that night I was in front of my mirror when I remembered that question. I’d never been asked that before and I was simply thinking how it was kind and thoughtful to be asked. My sometimes-dangerous mind became dangerous and automatically answered without thinking, screening or filtering from me, ‘mother’. Another simple but complex six-letter word that knocked me off balance. I laughed silently knowing the answer was from my heart this time, not my mind. I felt awkward about having a realization that at once created happiness and resignation regarding my own dream.
A few feet away from where I was in front of the mirror, in a box in my closet, is an old Thumbelina doll. She arrived brand new one Christmas morning, a gift from Santa. She was my favorite doll ever. Once I held her I never put her down. I would watch TV, play and jump on the bed with that doll wiggling on my left shoulder. I broke the original dial that made her move like a baby, from overuse and was devastated. My Mom, in her infinite wisdom, sent her to a doll hospital to be repaired. I vividly remember the moment in the kitchen when my Dad opened the box the hospital had addressed to me, with my repaired Thumbelina. They had changed the dial to a pull chord however I knew she was mine. By then she and I had the same wild looking hair. I knew my baby when I saw her.
I didn’t know though that she may have helped create me……I thought I could play piano, I thought I could be a music therapist, I thought I would teach preschool music, I thought I could be blah, blah, blah. God and Thumbelina thought I would be a mother. Who could undermine such a power couple?
“I am what I am and I’ve yet to figure out what I can be”
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