My Mother's Dream

It's no secret (if you read my profile) that I love cooking and I also love to write. Every once in a while I write something even if it is not food related in content. This memory is close to my heart and I think it sends a message which is to follow your dreams.

My Mother’s Dream

By Patty Haxton Anderson

I have just recalled a memory from childhood but I am not sure how old I was when this happened. Perhaps I was close to my teen age years. The memory is choppy and somewhat vague. My mother was doodling on some paper; well it’s more like she was attempting to sketch something.

Invading her space and looking over her shoulder I saw that she was actually drawing a face or perhaps a tree or a vase of flowers? Doesn’t matter – what matters was that I noticed the drawing had form to it and life and was impressed that my mother could draw.

I complimented her and she told me something that I did not know until that day: that after high school she was planning to go on to art school. However, she did not. Instead she married and had children. Another time I spotted her taking some boxes down from a shelf and I do recall that she called me to her and showed me what was in the boxes. She actually allowed me to peak into her past.

What she produced was some of the work she had done in high school along with her diploma and some old pictures and newspaper clippings of the ad graphics that she found interesting back when she was “younger”.

Now as I sit here typing this I find it sad that she never did pursue her dream of becoming a graphic artist. That was going to be her main goal – to become a graphic artist. I sit here and imagine that she would have had dreams of going to the big city, perhaps New York where she would have become some kind of graphic, marketing person working for a then famous magazine.

She gave up a dream and stored it in a box and allowed that dream to sit on a shelf for years. Was she being a martyr or was it a true act of selflessness? I do know that we spoke a few words that day and you could see the sparkle in her when she spoke of her dream but could also see behind that sparkle a face that seemed to heave a huge sigh. The sigh was that of something she kept with her, her whole life.

Even when we were older and her financial situation changed she never did go after her dream. I don’t know what happened to that box of dreams she had. Somewhere along the line the box went missing literally and figuratively. Oh, how I wish she could have had the courage to pursue it.

And maybe, just maybe in her Heaven she has.