Dreaming in Captivity

And finding the keys that can set us free

It’s the month of green smoothies, Dry January, gym memberships and vision boards! If the Christmas season was an outward frenzy of preparations, gifts and gatherings, January feels like an inward frenzy of figuring out how to be better at everything.

As for me? Well, I’m here in sweatpants, eating stale tortilla chips at the kitchen sink and asking myself, for the 400th time today, what actually is, for dinner?

For years, I used to love sitting down each January and drafting a roadmap for the year ahead. I did this exercise in my personal life and I asked my teams at work to do it too. If you don’t dream it, you can’t live it! I’m sure I used to say.

But over the recent years, something has changed. Maybe it’s the confines of mothering three young children, or the weight of my breast cancer diagnosis that still lingers on my psyche. Maybe it’s just middle age, which feels a lot like balancing on a seesaw with my potential and my reality sitting on opposing sides. When I think about the year ahead, I can’t seem to come up with dreams that will fit the actual life that I have built, the one I live. For every one I write down, there is an equal and opposite reason why it is likely impossible. And if not impossible, terribly inconvenient for those who depend on me.

On days like today, I feel as if I am looking out from a cage. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful here. It is a beautiful cage of my own making! It is shiny and gilded and bejeweled, exactly how I designed it. It is also comfortable and safe and I am deeply loved inside it. It is a lovely place.

But I am not free. 

I stare at the first question in my freshly-printed “Unravel Your Year” workbook, the same New Year’s planning tool I’ve used for years:

“What do you most want to happen this year?” it asks, though the font is too small for the size of the question.

The only thing I can think to write is —

Find the keys.

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Before I had my three daughters, way back when I was trying to imagine what it would be like to have a child, I only ever imagined having a baby - a tiny, sweet little thing, soft and plump. A baby who, if I did all the right things, wouldn’t cry too much, would giggle easily and would remain, naturally, in that stage of safe immobility forever. I daydreamed about what it would feel like to wander the shaded streets of Berkeley with a baby napping against my chest. It felt good.

There were so many things I never imagined! So many things I wasn’t prepared for! When my first daughter was an infant, I used to stare at the second hand of the clock and think, How is it only 9am? But then, overnight, my sleepy (/screaming) little lap pet learned to walk and talk. Suddenly she rode her bike without training wheels and brushed her own teeth. Now she’s in puberty. I never imagined navigating the emotional changes of an adolescent in my daydreams about motherhood! It seems that as soon as I get a handle on one developmental phase, another one arrives. Multiplied by three trains on three different tracks at three different speeds.

There is more sleep in my life now, if I’m lucky. But there is very little rest. 

I also had no idea about the constant-ness of it all, the drone of domesticity and how much needed to get done every day just to keep up, just to keep everyone alive. My brain created a new compartment that houses a mental load even this Virgo has trouble keeping organized. It feels very, very crowded up there.

At bedtime the other night, I sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to four year-old Heidi and rubbed her back until her eyes closed. When she finally fell asleep, I walked over to Nina’s room, who’s just turned nine. She sat up to hug me. Behind her, I could see that the pillow was stained with tears. In my arms, she quietly asked me if her friend in Ukraine could die in the war. I didn’t know how to answer her. I don’t know how to be all these different mothers at the same time.

It’s no wonder I’ve lost the ability to find headspace for my own dreams.

I will tell you this - my book shelves are full of books about childhood development, subjects ranging from DIY baby purees to toddler Montessori activities, to brain function in adolescence. Nowhere on this shelf is a book that describes a mother’s own transformative growth alongside her children.

Nowhere is a guide for the feeling I have had for eleven years - that I am a phoenix not yet risen, still shapeless and smoldering in her ashes. 

But the biggest thing no one warned me about is this: From the moment I held that first little girl in my arms, I would forever dream in captivity. From that day forward, I would not consider a single thing happening in my life without considering my daughters first. I would not make a single New Year’s resolution or book a trip or aspire to a new job without first thinking about the total impact it would have on the family. I would become a willing captive to their love, captive to everyone else’s changing needs and captive to the mystical, if not unrealistic, ideal of the kind of mother I wanted to be. 

When I got married, a word repeated over and over in my heart as if for the first time - softly and sweetly at first. Then it reached deafening decibels when our third daughter was born: Us. 

The old definition of Me was on a page ripped out of the dictionary and thrown in the trash.

Motherhood also gave me a new and silent instinct toward selflessness that rearranged every list I ever made. Without asking, it moved my name from the very top to the very bottom.

This thinking is exactly what put the lock on the cage.

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Since we moved to Austria, I’ve made it a New Year’s tradition to visit our local florist the day we take down the Christmas tree. Getting fresh flowers helps ease the newfound darkness in our living room. In years past, there haven’t been many flowers to choose from - a few tulips or bundles of green eucalyptus imported from hothouses in Holland. It’s January, after all. But this year, our florist had a huge container of gnarly, bare tree branches displayed in a big ceramic vase. They were very long, dark brown and moody, their shape was poetic.

When we got home, I arranged them quickly in a vase by the window and didn’t give them much thought.

The next morning, I came downstairs to make coffee and was shocked to find that all of the branches had bloomed dozens of exquisite, tiny coral flowers. When I bought them, I hadn’t noticed that they were adorned with tiny, closed buds. 

It dawned on me in that early morning light - if a budded branch could still blossom in January with the right conditions, I could too. 

I wrote a second goal in my workbook:

Create the right conditions.

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Not knowing how to do all of this - this being free and captive - isn’t our fault. Life arrives in sections and builds a frame around us, often without us noticing. Sometimes it feels like a cage, but it’s also a home. To live a life without this protective shelter would be its own form of angst and misery.

The goal is to not feel trapped in the life we have made. I want to trust that I can grow in my life and not out-grow it at the same time. I crave both security and expansiveness.

Your personal cage may be the responsibilities of parenting young children. It might be a big health diagnosis or inertia in your career. It could be the limiting belief you tell yourself about your age or your marriage. It might be a difficult relationship or grieving a relationship that’s over. The ache inside the cage is the same.

In the coming weeks, I want to remind myself of all the things that create a spaciousness in my soul - these are the keys to the cage. Together, we’ll explore things like the importance of creativity in daily life, how to prioritize rest & ease, and why seeking fountains, not drains, in our relationships can set us free. I also want to write about the importance of paying closer attention in daily life and about my experience with a transformative meditation practice.

My hope is that in reminding myself - and all of us - of these keys, we can find a way to stay tethered to the life we have made while also having the freedom to blossom inside of it.

Come with me. It’s a New Year. Let’s pick all the locks.

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A dear friend of mine fled the war in Ukraine when it began and sought refuge in Vienna with her three children. For over a year, she tried her very best to build a new life here. But the homesickness for her country and for the extended family she left behind consumed her with a debilitating sadness. Eventually, the longing for her homeland pulled her back and she returned to Ukraine this past summer. Her family’s situation is complicated and the future is unknown, but for now, they are back home and the aching in their hearts has shifted.

She visited Austria over Christmas and when she came to my house, she brought me a small jar of golden honey, made by her neighbor in Kiev. When I held it up to the light, it glowed pure translucent gold.

Can you imagine? Though missiles flew overhead, someone planted a flower garden. In the cage that is war and terror and the unknown, bees made honey and their keeper put it into jars. 

Surely, there is hope for the rest of us.

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"Now Comes The Long Blue Cold”

Now comes the long blue cold
And what shall I say but that some
Bird in the tree of my heart
Is singing.

The same heart that only yesterday
Was a room shut tight, without dreams.

Isn't it wonderful the cold wind and
Spring in the heart inexplicable.
Darling girl. Picklock.

- Mary Oliver, Red Bird