New Dreams, When the Old Ones Don't Fit

On Valentine's Day this year, my 41-year-old cousin Ryan was making a batch of ice cream for his girlfriend at their home in Raleigh. Suddenly, a stroke felled him, the indirect result of a congenital heart condition many of us had stopped thinking about long ago. He died two days later. I struggled to think of what to write to his parents, my aunt and uncle. Unfathomably, this was the second son they had lost. Shortly after receiving the news, I threw a few inadequate words together and sent them through Facebook. Within an hour came this instant message from my aunt: "Whatever it is you want to do, if you can do it, do it now." It takes a special person to offer a lesson to others in the midst of a giant personal loss. As the initial shock of losing Ryan mellowed over the next few days, her words resonated in my mind. If ever there was a time to listen to a family member's advice, this was it. But I was disturbed that even in the face of a dramatic message to live for the moment, I couldn't escape my cautious, penny-pinching, let'snot-splurge mentality even to conjure up a response to my aunt's exhortation. I sat down with a fellow penny-pincher, my husband, Alejandro, to talk it out. Two lifetimes spent saving mean Alejandro and I have some money to spend on a dream. What, I asked, do we really want to do? *** At first, the answer seemed obvious: Alejandro wanted to visit Israel, where he spent his teenage years, and I wanted to go back to Spain, where I lived and worked intermittently in my teens and 20s. But after some initial planning, we realized that these trips were purely nostalgic, that many of the people and places we longed for weren't there anymore, and that we would spend a fortune on these vacations, only for the kids to be too young to appreciate them. Then I came up with the idea of going back to flamenco classes. In my 20s, I was an avid flamenco dancer and the producer of a flamenco dance company. But after looking into classes, I realized they would keep me out of the house during dinner time several days a week. Flamenco dancing is important to me, but making dinner for my kids is much more so. I shelved the idea. Alejandro has talked for years about buying a really nice car, though every time he's had to replace his car, he's gone for a sensible, midrange model, usually from an auction. "Do it! Once in your life!" I commanded. Though I myself could never splurge on a fancy status symbol, I took satisfaction in the idea that Alejandro would derive happiness from the kind of car he always wanted. Nonetheless, when he came back from the dealership recently, he was driving a model very similar to what he had before. "I can't do it," he admitted. "I've got to keep a low profile." Each time we came up with something we'd always wanted to do, we talked ourselves out of it. At first, I blamed our inherent tightfistedness. Then I realized it wasn't just an aversion to spending that was holding us back: We also lacked real enthusiasm for the things we'd spent so many years wanting. Our old dreams, it seemed, didn't fit us anymore. *** It left us both with a strange, empty feeling. "Any one of us could see our last day tomorrow," I said to Alejandro. "Are we so conservative and boring that we can't even think of one adventure we want to go on?" "Maybe so," Alejandro said. "But all I dream about now are things for the family." When I was a young feminist, I would have been appalled by the notion of erasing my own passions and subsuming them into a husband and kids. But I knew just how Alejandro felt. From the day our eldest was born, I lost the ambitious spirit that once propelled me on artistic exploits around the globe. My world became our home, our future and every hair on our child's head. "Well, what are those dreams for the kids?" I said. We came up with a list. Alejandro wanted to take Danny, our 4-year-old, to Uruguay in the spring, to improve his Spanish. I wanted to take a week off to be a stay-at-home mom with the boys this summer. We both wanted to spend this Thanksgiving in New York City, seeing friends and relatives and showing the boys their birthplace. We also talked about spending more time at the beach at home in Los Angeles and riding bikes more often with the kids. Before my aunt's note, our penny-pinching, nose-to-the-grindstone habits might have meant we let those items linger on a wish list. But this time, we cashed in frequent-flier miles for Uruguay, filed vacation time for a week off and bought tickets to New York for Thanksgiving. I can easily say that week in August, taking the boys swimming at the YMCA and spending lazy afternoons in a frozen-yogurt parlor near our house, was one of the best vacations of my life. When we bought those tickets to New York, I felt glad for our years not indulging more exotic desires, because that's why we had the money to do what we'd discovered was really important to us. Living your dreams, we've realized, is a state of mind. It's about knowing that where you are at any given moment is exactly where you want to be. Today, when we pedal around the neighborhood with the kids following like little goslings, or watch them spend hours digging hermit crabs out of the sand, I remind myself that all this is the greatest adventure of my life. And I often think of my cousin Ryan, who inspired this lesson, and send him a little prayer of thanks. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444897304578044680394134430.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5