Discussing Dreams at a Diner

“Are you proud?” my husband asked me as we sat across the table from one another at our local diner. A place that has become very special to us. It’s close, it’s easy, and it has that lovely diner vibe — you know the one. It’s adorable.

I love diners.

He asked me this question after I’d been talking about my Grandma Jane, and how proud she had been to be a feminist, and a woman doing all that she did. She remains my idol, my hero, the person I look up to because she showed me that girls can do anything, and be anything.

How many grandmas do you know who were both pilots and worked on a mountain building and testing explosives?

Exactly.

Of course I’m proud of my grandmother, but he wasn’t asking if I was proud of her. He knows I am. He was asking if I am proud of myself.

“You’ve done a lot, too, just like she has,” he said.

Honestly, it brought tears to my eyes. That doesn’t happen easily, but with him everything is different. He’s different, in all the very best ways.

Who in my life has ever taken the time to sit down and ask me about my dreams, or if I’m proud of how far I’ve come.

How many people ask you?

In our relationship, I ask a lot of questions. I’m very nosy. He doesn’t seem to mind and will answer every question I throw at him, but sometimes I turn it around: “Your turn, ask me a question…”

And that’s when he asked about my books — specifically my ideas for my children’s books.

In 2022, shortly after I moved into my first townhome on my own as a single mother, I set up a little office for myself and the kids to do crafts, paint, or pretty much any of the things we had been so used to doing for so many years.

It was in that room that I thought to myself, I’ll go ahead and be the author and illustrator I had been dreaming of being before COVID, and before my divorce.

Unfortunately, there was still quite a bit stacked against me and my dreams at the time. But before I set them down again, I had come up with an idea to write and illustrate a book about my grandmother, who had been a pilot in the 80s.

So I told him I was revisiting that recently. That I had sat down to think about it again, and maybe finally do what I had intended to do in 2022 — now that nothing is standing in front of my dreams anymore.

He said to me, being flattering as he usually is, “You have that rare combination of being both a dreamer and a doer. Usually people are one or the other, but you’re both. I know you’ll do it.” And his confidence in me brought more tears to my eyes. Almost to the point of not being able to hold them back. I had to avert my eyes to the window and hold my breath for a moment to keep it all from spilling out into the atmosphere of the diner, where only the two of us sat for a good long while before others trickled in for their coffee and breakfast.

Yes, my love, I am proud.   I’m proud of myself and the woman I have chosen to become. I’m proud not only of surviving everything that has been thrown at me, but of the ways I’ve learned to thrive despite it all. I’m proud that I’m still finding my way — sometimes through trial and error — back to my dreams.

And it helps so much that I have you. Someone who can see the struggles I’ve walked through, and the effort it took to become the woman sitting across from you now, hands wrapped around a warm mug of coffee in the diner we’ve grown to love together.

Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for supporting me.