What if This is the Dream? Life of Growing a Family
At home, the dinner table is usually where the conversation surrounding marriage, parenthood, and life transitions spark. Over the past two years of going through two pandemic childbirths, there were so many times I questioned my purpose in my current season of life. For a long time, I felt like I did not have the capacity to dream in the way I have known to dream once before having children. In between my days, there were so many things to attend to as a full-time stay-at-home parent.
There was a time in 2019 when my husband and I officially decided we were ready to start a family. We were grateful and blessed to be able to conceive and give birth to our firstborn girl in 2020. As we began to do life as a new family of three, we found ourselves learning so many things about ourselves, our marriage, and parenting.
Months before our daughter’s first birthday, we sat around the table again to have another conversation about wanting to add another addition to our family. As I had already endured childbirth in less than two years, it would be a risk to extend our family with two children under the age of two. After talking to our mentors, we felt the urge to work toward our second addition. Thankfully, we welcomed our son in January 2022.
As I stared around the dinner table with my daughter in her high chair, my husband across from me, and my son most likely in search of more milk, I said to my husband, “What if this is the dream right now?” Normally, raising children isn’t a defined dream one would discuss in our culture. Dreams are usually made up of career paths, building businesses, traveling the world, getting a college degree, and other things that put one at a high standard in our society.
It is so easy to look at children and believe they are going to be a burden to the future we are hoping to create for ourselves. To be fair, children come with many life adjustments. Full-time parenting at the age of 26 was the last thing I expected would happen years later after graduating college. What about the career I was supposed to have? What about my identity outside of being a mother and changing diapers all day?
For the past two years, I have found myself getting caught up in the societal pressure of what a dream and success is supposed to look like. I never thought deeply about how growing our family was my desired goal years before they were born. By one definition, a dream is a strongly desired goal or purpose. It was months before leaving the nonprofit job that I had a goal to be in a financial place with my husband so that I had the opportunity to stay home with my children. As hard as full-time parenting is, I had to come to a realization that everyone’s dream looks different and this stage of my life may not look like everyone else’s dream, goal, or vision.
Together, from the beginning of our marriage, my husband and I dreamed of having children together one day. As there are many careers and opportunities I can look to pursue, I have concluded that right now, in this season of my life, raising a healthy family at home full-time is a dream and each day I am finding purpose and value in it. A dream of raising children that would grow to be respectable leaders and change agents in the world around them.
What if you took the time to embrace where you are right now in your life? Could you pause and say, but what if where I am right now is the dream? What if I have overlooked an answered prayer I dreamed of that I am seeing right in front of me?
Photo by Benji Aird on Unsplash
