Words for the Wanderer: Dreaming a New Dream

Jan 13

Words for the Wanderer

It was 2016, and our oldest twins were 3 years old, our younger set just 10 months. We were living in a house we had built just a handful of years before in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. A nice, safe cul-de-sac. Great school district. Easy access to the interstate for Jon to get to work. By most standards, it had all the trappings of the perfect spot to raise our family.

But for years we had dreamed of buying an old, historic home in the city. After church on Sundays, we would drive through the old neighborhoods near downtown, swooning over the giant front porches and peering in the windows from our car. Until one day, I was driving near downtown with my mom and the kids when we saw an open house sign. "Let's just go walk through it - it'll be fun," she said. So we piled all the kids out of the car and made our way inside. With every room we walked through, I fell more in love, and by the time we were heading up the stairs, I was texting Jon saying, “we have to buy this house!”

He thought I was crazy of course…until the next Sunday when I convinced him to hit up the open house with me so he could see for himself. Not surprisingly, he fell just as hard or harder than I had and as we stood out in the backyard he said - "I'm going to die in this house." We were smitten.

Now, 8 years later, he jokes - “I literally did almost die in that house." But not in the way he meant that day standing outside as we prayed and hoped it could be ours. More in the sense that it almost was the death of the next version of our dreams. And of course his two late night falls down those slippery wooden stairs.

We spent the next 7 years raising businesses and babies in that old house. When our older twins were 6, we won the lottery (at least the school lottery) and enrolled them in kindergarten at our little neighborhood school. Jon was still driving across town for work every day, and I was working my small business on the days that all four kids were in school. The kids were learning + loving fencing, dance and gymnastics, playing outside with neighbor friends in all their free time. It was everything we had thought we wanted.

But there was something inside us that just didn’t feel aligned.

Over time, our interests, hearts and passions had begun to change. We caught a new vision for a very different kind of life, and we couldn't let it go. A vision for life free from the hustle + hurry. Free from all our energy, money and time going to maintain that big, beautiful house. Free from feeling stuck in a place where our hearts just didn't belong. Free from having our weekends packed with activities, being in the car and splitting our family up to keep all the balls in the air. But we felt so rooted in by everything that the idea of changing it all up felt nearly impossible.

We carried on with life for the next several years, our conversations about making big changes becoming more frequent over time. Jon and I’s once a week date night became dominated by these discussions. Why were we not satisfied? How could we change it all? Or even change any of it? Our dreams felt like they may just stay dreams forever.

But there was something inside me that just couldn’t give up. The thought of raising our kids through their whole childhood, knowing we never really lived the life we felt was calling us literally made me crazy. The pain of regret seemed way worse than the pain of uprooting everything we knew…and that’s saying a lot.

stay tuned next week for part II