A Vivid Dream

It's Tuesday March 24, 2020 and we are sheltering in place due to COVID-19 aka the Corona Virus. My kids are with their dad until tomorrow morning when I get them back for five days.

I have been working from home since Friday March 13. My work consists of calling people to check in on them and offer grief support a month after someone they love has died. I also call people at various intervals after the death--around six months and a year after. I am also translating a children's book about donation in Spanish and processing correspondence sent to us as the intermediary between the donor families and the transplant recipients.

I am in my first semester of graduate school, working towards earning my Masters in Social Work from Tulane University online. I am taking three classes which add up to seven credits. My classes are:

Diversity and Social Justice

Social Welfare History and Policy

Theories of Human Behavior, Part 1

We got last week off as the university worked to bring all the rest of the students online during this quarantine.

The kids' school closed after Friday March 13 so they have been doing a variety of learning activities here and with their dad since then. I feel grateful that there are four of them and that they are around the same age. Grateful for them to have the company and interaction; grateful for me because it is easier for me not to feel the need to engage or entertain one child.

I am writing my book. So far this looks like going through my old blog posts, journal entries, emails and voice memos to capture the details that I already have. For the first couple weeks of this year I woke up at 5 am every morning to write for an hour. I stopped doing that when I started school, got a bad cold and started staying up too late. Waking up early in the cold and dark seemed too hard. Since then I have written here and there but nothing consistent.

I am participating in my friend Isabelle's powerful, empowering online women's personal growth experience--Mom-Me Circle. She invited me to be a part of it on November 9, 2019 and I immediately felt a huge resistance come up in me. I am too busy! I do not have a big dream I am working towards! I am starting school! I can not take in any more input. I did not respond.

On December 2, 2019 I wrote her back:

Hello my sweet friend, It occurred to me yesterday that you asked me about this virtual circle and for whatever reason I balked at it the day your offer arrived. Fear of something but I couldn't really explore it at the time. Still haven't! I think the fear of "What specific dream would I even pick and do I have the bandwidth to work on? ack" So i'm circling back. I feel scared of this offer. Overwhelmed. Also, I was thinking of you yesterday with so much love and gratitude and wanted to check in. xoxo

We met for coffee on College Avenue in Berkeley a few days later and shone our friendship lights on one another. We caught up and brainstormed and heart-stormed and soaked up the gratitude of being seen and known and valued. I signed up for her course. We just finished our Week 9 Zoom group call last night. I want everyone I know to take part in it.

It occurs to me that part of me would want to journal daily for hours, just to capture a portion of the thoughts, observations, feelings, reactions, triggers, exchanges and moments that make-up a day. In this moment I want to stop here and do a juicy write-up of everything I am learning in her circle. I also want to write up some of the thoughts that flitted into my brain as I cooked lunch--about my privilege and the gratitude and shame it brings up in me, about how busy and overwhelmed I feel sometimes when I look at all there is to be done around here and how even taking away the kids, their school, my school, my commute, any in-person errands and any in-person communication I still have moments of feeling like there is not enough time and not a clear place to start. This awareness startles me and soothes the part of me that wants to rest almost all of the time.

In Mom-Me Circle we worked towards finding and declaring a Vivid Dream. At the beginning of the year I thought mine was to write this book. Last week, in Week 8 of our circle and Week 1 of our quarantine I felt tears come to my eyes as my Vivid Dream settled over me.

I write this book and while I do it I will fall in love with writing. I will embrace that this love pushes me and stretches me to grow. I will acknowledge that the kind of love I want means showing up consistently and resting regularly. I will fall in love knowing that I am scared of lots of parts of love and when I get scared I throw up all sorts of defense mechanisms to keep me from feeling vulnerable, to keep me safe. In this new kind of love I know to ask for help when I feel that fear come up instead of running away. In this new kind of love I know that running away will still happen sometimes and I will forgive myself for that. In this new kind of love I will look for the small, daily celebrations and acknowledgements that we need and want to hear.

Please tell me more about your Loves and what they look like and feel like.