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I’m an excellent driver. Being a mom, I’ve perfected my ability to simultaneously drive the van, discipline the kids, and change the DVD—that’s multi-tasking, my friend. In spite of this amazing talent, my husband does the driving on long car trips. “It’s not because you’re a bad driver,” he tells me. “It’s because you can sleep in the car and I can’t.” Okay, valid point. I’m also an excellent sleeper. Due to my tendency towards motion sickness, I can’t read a book or check Facebook on my phone or crochet in the car. Turning around to pass out juice boxes even makes me want to puke. My husband will no longer humor me with car games (“Female actress from the 1980’s. You’ve got twenty questions…go!”), so I either sleep or daydream. When I’m not feeling very sleepy, I’ll recline my seat and just start thinking. Sometimes I fantasize about becoming a famous author. I’m being interviewed at the red carpet premiere of the movie version of my latest novel. Cameras are flashing as the paparazzi are yelling at me, “This way, Abby. Who are you wearing, Abby? You look amazing, Abby! How did you lose those thirty pesky pounds?” I would just smile and say, “Clean living, boys. I credit it all to clean living.” Sometimes I write a screenplay in my mind. For instance, I recently created an entire drama starring my husband and me. It was a “It’s a Wonderful Life”-type story where we broke up my freshman year (instead of dating all through college and getting married the day I graduated). He married a seemingly genuine, but–in my opinion–overly attractive girl. They moved away so he could enroll in medical school but she realized being married to a poor med student wasn’t what she had signed up for so she left him for a dermatology resident who was willing to help her finance a new Lexus. We met years later. I had never married and he still loved me. It was like that Dan Fogelberg song they play at Christmastime except we didn’t meet at a grocery store and I didn’t spill the contents of my purse while we laughed until we cried. And sometimes I just fantasize how I could organize my pantry better. With the current pace of our often-hectic lives, it’s a nice break to be able to just sit and daydream. A friend who is now cancer-free recently told me what a treat it is for her to go her oncologist every three months for a check-up to get a CT scan. She’s forced to sit very still under a warm blanket in a dark room. There’s definitely something appealing about that! We’re pulled in so many directions. We have calendars on our phones reminding us where we need to be in the next five minutes and yet we still feel like we’re a day behind. Even now, as I’m typing, I hear an annoying voice in my head telling me to go down to the laundry room and take the sheets out of the dryer so the towels can go in. It’s dizzying. So here are my New Year’s Resolutions: Slow Down. Pray More. Invite God into my Daydreams. I may not believe all of my daydreams, but I am a big believer in them. I’m going to make room for plain, old thinking and see where God takes me. *I’ve had the song “Daydream Believer” by The Monkees in my head for the entire time I’ve been typing. When I get to the part “You once thought of me as a white knight on a steed…” I always get stuck. I keep singing the end of the verse something like this: “But how much paper do they really need?” I looked it up and, believe it or not, that’s not how it goes. So disappointing.


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Daydream Believer*

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