Beautiful Stories
A handful of years before I started Haven, I began to experiment with vision boards and a focused building of our family’s life. It started simple enough - I put pictures of National Parks I wanted to visit, road trip maps, baseball stadiums and images for budgeting and saving. At the time, the vision board felt like a wild dream. We were barely above paycheck to paycheck status. I don’t know the science of it all, but something about looking at those pictures every day helped focus my choices and by the end of the year we’d visited a handful of National Parks and the baseball stadium that was on the vision board. It felt amazing to have a vision for our lives and then to experience that dream becoming a reality.
I, by nature, fall into the category of visionary. I didn’t know this about myself for most of my life. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t know it about myself until I started Haven in 2019 and everyone around me started telling me that I was a visionary. It makes sense. I have a nearly constant relationship with the future… not for preparation’s sake, that would be my husband. I’m just constantly picturing the future. I’ve been doing it all my life. Who do I want to be when I grow up? What will my family look like? What do I want to do with my life??
Here’s the thing - I think we’re all visionaries to some extent. Almost everybody that I’ve talked to in my life has some sort of plan for their future. All of us ask those questions. How we answer them is individual - but we all ask them.
I don’t know about you, but when I picture myself in the future, it’s always my best self. I’m radiant and full of joy, I’m at peace with my life decisions, I’m a great mom - a kind and patient mother - and my children are functional members of society who more or less grow up to be who I always pictured them becoming. Our home is full of laugher, family traditions flow effortlessly, everybody in our home is experiencing secure attachment. Brad and I are both fulfilled in our work and enjoy the fruit of our labor.
I can create a lovely picture.
We all can.
This, more than anything else, is a common theme at every retreat. We judge the real life versions of ourselves and our home against the imaginary one, and the imaginary one wins every time. It becomes our standard… our “should”. This “should be” like that… our kid “should be” fill in the blank… over this by now? Potty trained? Able to make it all the way through a day at school. It gets deeper though… I’m not the mom that I thought I was going to be. My marriage isn’t what I thought it was going to be…
This isn’t the life that I thought I was going to have.
Sometimes we get stuck here in the disconnect between what we thought and what actually is. I always write from experience… it’s the only way I know how. I’ve been here many times in my journey as a foster and adoptive mom. I’m currently stuck here not with regard to fostering but for what I thought my life was going to look like.
20 year old Rebecca couldn’t have pictured this life if she tried. In fact, one of my mentors recently asked me “What would 20 year old Rebecca say if she could see you now? Don’t you think she would be really proud of you?” And I blurted out “She would be really confused!!” Not quite the response he thought he would be getting.
42 year old Rebecca is releasing some really beautiful stories of what life “should” look like.
Getting unstuck is as simple as unclenching our tight grip on our beautiful stories and falling in love with reality. By which, I mean to say, maybe it’s not simple at all…