Pressure

Well now that I've mentioned having epiphanies, I feel so much pressure!

But, as I try to put my feelings into words, I realize how deeply personal these feelings are. I haven't shared my new "dreams" about what I want to do and accomplish with anyone. I've just been formulating them in my own mind and I think I'm a little shy about sharing.


I wonder if there is some secret fear that if I voice this stuff, I might fail at it. I don't want this to be true, but the more I think about it, the more this seems to be so.


Am I embarrassed by my new dream? Does it seem vain and silly to have thought so much about myself this past week? This realization I made was a little bit like John Updike's A Prayer for Owen Meany. Like almost all the events of my life have been leading to one thing. To one accomplishment.


As I say it, it does sound silly to me. I can't help myself, I'm not comfortable sounding confident about myself. I always have this voice that questions my own convictions. Not about external things, just about myself. I can very comfortably challenge a member of the Town Board and feel sure about my arguments. But within my own psyche - there's always this nagging doubt.

The last time I had a dream I was completely confident in was when I decided to go to graduate school 16 years ago. I was going to be a teacher in the New York public schools and somehow change the whole messed up system. I was going to make such enormous improvements, somehow single-handedly, that minorities educated in the inner city would have the same level of education as their white suburban counterparts.

Yes I was idealistic. I was 23 years old when this dream first occurred to me. But I was certain that I could do it. And I countered negative comments with cheerful assurances that they were wrong, and I was right.

Well, things didn't exactly go the way I'd planned. My first job in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn was tough. Nothing I'd learned at Hunter prepared me for the pressure of assessments and there was little time for social changes once I'd planned every day to the minute. The principal was tough, and she seemed to have it in for me. But the biggest roadblock to my dream was this: halfway through my first year teaching 4th grade in Bed-Stuy, I became pregnant with my son. He was born in the summer, and after that I never went back to Bed-Stuy or teaching. And there the dream died.

This was a very difficult thing for me. I didn't even realize what a loss it had been for me until years later. But my dream had vanished. And now I know, however silly it might have been, that it can never again be realized. The passing of years, the mothering of children, the weight and pressure of personal responsibilities. These things pushed the glimmer of my old dream, or any other, far below the horizon.

So now, the thought of another dream, an ideal, a purpose for my life (other than being wife and mother and housekeeper) well, to be honest, is a little scary. It's going to require some courage to share it as boldly as I did back when I was a 20 something idealist with my whole life ahead of me.

Maybe keeping this one concealed for a while makes sense. Or maybe it's just wimpy.