Sacrificing a Dream

Not too long ago, Elle Décor published a personal essay from a woman who said she and her husband sacrificed having a third child in order to have their dream home. The article received a lot of back lash. And while my opinion is that they chose NOT to sacrifice their dream home/her ability to be a stay at home parent to have a third child, the point of this post is not to bash this woman further.

She and her husband made a difficult choice. To her, it feels like she has given up something important, even if that something was just a dream, in order to have something else. And I understand that feeling.

This past weekend we spent a day with Pop Tart’s new friend from the neighborhood. At one point this 11 year old was telling me that her plan was to have two kids, named Ben and Anna. She wanted to adopt them, probably when they were about the age Pop Tart was when she was adopted – which was 9.

I smiled and told her that sounded like a good plan, except for one thing. By the time a child is 9, they already have a name. So unless she tracked down kids named Ben and Anna to adopt, she probably was not going to get to name them.

We grow up thinking of what we are going to name our kids. Or at least girls my age did. It was a common conversation to share what your favorite names were. At one point, I wanted to name a daughter Winter Dawn. Trevor Cale was my favorite boy’s name for years and years.

When C and I were dating, we talked about kids. At the time, we assumed we would do things in the “usual” way, and we came up with names for our future children. I have known what I would name my first boy and my first girl for the last fifteen years, and we even had some good back up ideas if there happened to be two of one gender.

But then we decided to adopt. And we chose not to adopt an infant, but an older child. And if we adopt a second time, it will also be an older child.

Those names we spent hours discussing and choosing, those names I fell in love with and have carried in my heart for a decade and a half, will remain unused. I will never give them to a child. And that is the sacrifice of a dream- the dream, the expectation we almost all have, that we will get to name our own children.

I am a writer of fiction as well as of blogs. I name characters all the time. And yet, the names we chose for our future children have yet to make it into anything I have written. Maybe someday they will. I will not force myself to give those names out. Names will be assigned to my characters based on what feels like the right name for the character. I fully accept that the names I chose for my future children may never feel right for a character.

Those names are a piece of me, a piece I hold tightly to. They are remnants of a dream. And they are important. Not having the ability to name my own children is a sacrifice.

But it is a sacrifice I will make again. Because some bits of reality are worth so much more than a dream.