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All I can say is that I'm am thankfully finished with yet another assignment for by Strategic Business class. Each week brings me that much closer to the end of the term and an opportunity to take something that I will enjoy. I think everyone gets burned out when they are so close to finishing a degree but I seem to be having it a little worse. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I don't really want to do business as a career. It has been a rather melancholy day and depressing thoughts creep in in the middle of the night.

This brings me to my thought for the evening. Do you ever find yourself grieving for the dreams you shatter, however willing it was done? For some of us it is to get married and have lots of kids. For others it is to get your degree. For me it was to become a marine biologist and travel the world studying one thing or another. I planned my entire childhood around that goal. I did SCUBA at 14 and made sure to take almost every science course offered in my highschool. I reviewed offers from colleges who were going to allow me to attend for only $2,500 a year. This was including tuition and boarding. I spent the better part of my childhood reading science texts in preparation for the future. Then I just seemed to wake up one day and abandon that dream. A part of me still bleeds for that dream I held as a child. That perfect certainty in what I wished to do with my life with no doubt that I could accomplish all of my goals. Then I think of the things I would miss if I had been granted my most fervent childhood wish.

I would never see my son turn to me with an open smile and just say I love you for no reason. I would never have held my baby girl close to my heart because I was so overflowing with emotion that she was perfectly healthy. I wouldn't have a husband who loves me despite my tempermental nature and tendency to be both happy and sad all at once. I wouldn't know what it feels like to learn that all my sanity rested on my son's ability to learn to breath after being born prematurely. I wouldn't know how to love someone so unconditionally that nothing will ever take it away or tarnish the depth of the feeling. I guess in short I would have missed what it felt like to love. I would have lived a cold existance always searching for the next puzzle to solve and never stopping to even acknowledge the things that I was missing out on. I would have contented myself with always striving to go further, and by the time I knew what was missing in my life it would have been too late to capture all I have now. I guess it is a good lesson in being careful what you wish for.

I realize now, after writing this I cry not for the dream that was unfulfilled. I cry for the certainty in who I was and what I wanted. My life is much more clouded to me now. I'm entering a profession that I'm not passionate about merely talented. I am making up rules of parenting as I go wondering if in 18 years I'll look back and know I was doing the wrong thing or worse yet find that I was a horrible mother. I am facing the fear of failing when we attempt to end our time with the military and enter into a situation none of us feel prepared for. With all this confusion and my feeling of fear, I brought myself to tears writing of some of the things I would have missed if I had chosen a different path in life and I can say now with clarity that I will bleed for my dream no longer. Instead, I will forge a new dream and new goals that will meet my new desires in life. I will think on these goals and maybe, for once, have a less morose post:)