What Chasing Dreams Looks Like
What six pages of a notebook say about a mom's journey | No. 020
I don’t know why I have an affinity for scrawling notes on legal pads. Maybe it stems from my childhood years of writing in little hardback diaries locked with tiny golden keys, long before I ever typed a single thing on a computer. Maybe it seems more writerly or romanticized to handwrite instead of type. In college, I would often see one of my favorite literature professors, an elderly man who was kind and quirky, sitting in an armchair in our university library writing out entire class lectures by hand on his own legal pads. He had a memory that could rival anyone fifty years younger than himself, and I wonder if it had anything to do with how he processed information in such a methodical and slow way.
No matter the origin of my love for writing on legal pads, they are cumbersome to work with in some ways. It’s impossible to organize the contents, and they always turn into a mysterious mountain of who-knows-what’s-in-there. Yet, these legal pads live on my kitchen counter, in my tote bags, on the end tables in the nursery, and in stacks on my bookshelves. They’ve become my adulthood equivalent of my childhood teddy bear collection, something to which I’ve formed an unexplainable attachment.
However, this week, my nine-month-old baby found herself a new hobby of her own: finding loose papers and engaging in gleeful destruction. She has been speedily bear-crawling with a smile to the end tables, the bookshelves, and the household nooks and finding papers to chew, throw, crumple, rip, and destroy.
This initially upset my nine-year-old son when she found his paper airplane supplies and made quick work of some of those. He only felt better when I assured him that he and the baby had two different jobs in the house: his was construction, and hers was destruction. We talked about what each of those words meant, and I assured him that when baby was older, she would work construction with him, but she couldn’t yet because babies only work in destruction.
He seemed mostly satisfied with this explanation and now loves to announce to me loudly, “Mom! Baby’s doing destruction! I will fix it with my construction!” They work together a little better now, given their understood roles. However, I still realized it was time to move my precious legal pads to a safer location.
After one enthusiastic destruction session while my son was at school (and thereby unavailable to assist with reconstruction), I grabbed all my legal pads from the danger zones and piled them on the kitchen table. I planned on glancing through them, skimming the contents, and throwing out what I no longer needed.
I picked up one pad, the one from the end table in the nursery, and I noticed it was quite thin. I counted the pages. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Page One: crossed out scribbled out vetoed ideas for writing projects along with a few ideas that that didn’t get the ol’ scribble-over. Coffee stains. Old milk rings from baby’s dripping bottles. Wrinkled paper from being used as a coaster.
Page Two: Notes from a phone discussion regarding a new part-time job I took on last month. The starting date, possible pay, job duties, supervisor’s names, a few question marks. Even bigger and more extensive coffee stains. More wrinkled paper.
Page Three: The whole page is filled with stars, parentheses, dates, times, and details for a little side gig of supervising a special education student teacher in training in a local school. More coffee stains.
Page Four: A chore list for our teenager, some done, some not. Vacuum, clean room, dishes. Clean sinks and shower. Near the bottom of the page, a grocery list. Medicine, tortillas. Formula. Sandwich bags. Hoagie buns. Starbucks card for J. In the middle of the page, a math problem I imagine was calculating meal carbohydrates for my oldest child who has Type 1 Diabetes. 26 + 26 + 13 = 65. 65 x 2 = 130. Why the 130 is crossed out, I’ll never know. The paper is still wrinkled, but the coffee stains are growing fainter.
Page Five: Blank. Only traces of coffee stains.
Page Six: Another chore list for my teenager. Empty garbage. Unload dishwasher. Wash dirty laundry. Dry. Put Away. The coffee stains on page six are barely visible now.
I actually needed to keep nothing in this legal pad. I almost threw it away. But then, I stared at it for a minute longer. I saw my writing ideas on the first page accompanying the coffee, the baby’s bottle rings. Underneath that, the half-finished chore lists, groceries, job notes, a math equation for my child’s medical needs. The blank fifth page.
Working toward writing dreams is not a separate affair from the rest of my life, nor is the process tidy, straightforward, or easy. Kids, household tasks, jobs, chores, and lots of spilled beverages happen simultaneously and walk hand-in-hand with the writing dreams. All of this life is in the same legal pad on the nursery table—an incomplete but concise summary of a dreaming mama’s life.
This is what chasing dreams looks like.
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This sounds so familiar. The details are different, but the feeling is the same! I like hearing the details though. It makes it all so much more real.
Unfortunately, I bet most of the chore lists were in my handwriting. I learned from my mother.