What are your dreams for your children?
Are you as resolutioned out as I am?
Just a few weeks in to the New Year, I am already at the eye-rolling stage every time I see one more article, commercial, or post on LIVING RIGHT! Perhaps it's that I am fully immersed in my own resolutions, which are actually twelve small but significant things I want to finally address in 2011.
The smallish goals include de-cluttering my desk and finally donating the six person-high stacks of clothing in the middle of my basement floor. The loftier ambitions include getting one to two more hours of sleep a night regularly and wrangling my budget into better working order. All of the monthly resolutions are significant, however simple or sizable, because they were designed to help me be a better person, to be the woman/mother/writer I want to be.
And despite being masked in pounds lost or calories trimmed or books read or meditations mastered, isn't that the true spirit of resolutions -- to become the person you dream of being, or at least to be bits of that person more often?
We get all caught up in the tasks of resolutions, in whether we will fail or fulfill them, so of course they make us weary and overwhelmed and irritated by the middle of January. What if we pulled back, though? What if we stopped stressing so much about the details of how we will make those resolutions happen and embraced the spirit of it all as a person who laughs more, glides more easily in her body, yells less, connects with neighbors, takes appropriate time off? Doesn't that sound divine?
It does. It's also not easy, especially when you're late for carpool, out of milk, behind on bills, frantically searching for that one Polly Pockets piece.
How about instead we take a breath, exhale the scream of the scale and the call of the grocery store and all that crazy resolution hype, and think about something easier, lovely, and really wonderful? What if we put words to our dreams for our children?
Yes, our kids. The ones who inspire and exhaust and love and entertain and delight and make us crazy. How would you like your own child to live in the next year or even many years ahead? What pure and silly and wonderful things do you see in her that you hope she carries with her into adulthood? What talents would you like him to develop? What family traditions do you wish for your baby to take into her own home one day?
If we can imagine and then say aloud some of these hopes, we will honor who these unique people are who smear us with soy butter and use permanent marker to decorate our new leather couch and who snuggle up against us. Maybe we can use this year to help some of those dreams come true, adding more time to do crafts to the day or signing up for banjo lessons or having a Star Wars movie marathon weekend.
Perhaps the practice of voicing those dreams and thinking about how to help them along will also help us, as parents and people, more fully embrace how we'd like to better ourselves in bigger ways than even running a 5K or paying down debt can express.
That could turn into a pretty transformative year for the whole family, which is a resolution I'd happily make and hear about over and over again.
Shine's Parenting Gurus will be writing this month about the dreams they have for their children. Won't you join us by sharing, too?
What dreams do you have for your child?
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