How Well Can You Dream if Your Past Weighs More Than Your Belief in the Future?

August was dream month in Flourish (the class for adopted people I do with Pam Cordano), and so I’ve been thinking a lot about people and the dreams they do or do not allow themselves to have.

When women relinquish their children to other parents, it’s often, I’m assuming, with the belief that the child will have a better chance of having and realizing dreams with parents who are more financially stable, more emotionally stable, more available during the day and night, more more more more.

What if this mother were allowed to pin stars all over her baby’s onesie (little pins that wouldn’t hurt a fly) that spelled out the dreams the mother imagined for her child as the child went from her body to the arms of another? What if the child grew up with these stars kept in a special box they could access privately at any time?

What if the child was encouraged to add stars of their own to this box, with the adoptive parents' understanding that they had adopted, as April Dinwoodie said in her latest podcast episode of Born in June, Raised in April, a family system? This would mean the family had also adopted the child’s biological mother’s dreams and her mother’s dreams (and so on) as well as the still yet unformulated dreams of the child.

What if the parents who had adopted the child were mindful not to cast an imposing shadow of their own outlines over the dreams of their child, letting the whole picture form: the picture of a child with possibly four parents and the child and the child’s dreams that are forming in the child’s head as it learns to feel safe and accepted and wild in the world?

Having dreams can be risky for adopted people. An important narrative in my family was that there was never enough money. Their story became my story and so I fit in. I was part of a family that believed it never had enough money.

For me to realize the dream of waking up to a day and feeling peaceful and at home was to risk separating myself from my tribe. I needed to have the same anxieties they did so I could locate myself on the map. This is who I am. I am a person who is like the people who raised me.

The story that money comes easily and is not a problem was not a language that was accepted in my house. That was like saying you could go to school and not do homework. Life just doesn’t work like that.

So because I agreed to have money worries, other dreams, such as living in Florence, seemed like a dream for another person since someone like me could not afford to move to Italy. My past was too heavy for the lightness of my dreams to carry me forward.

I wonder what would happen if people who felt defined by their past could get hold of a magical ax and hack at the umbilical (I have to look up the spelling of this word every time I write it) that binds them and seemingly feeds and nourishes them. We survived the first cutting. We can certainly, I imagine, survive and maybe even wildly bloom, a second.

Cutting the cord does not make the love any less. It does, however, create more freedom.

Just how light are your dreams, anyway?

Light travels so darn fast.

Hang on.

You got this.