“I’m tired of having hope,” I said to my friend.
“It seems like having hope means you’re not sure the thing going to happen. So, let’s just stop having hope and know it’s going to happen.” I was sure of what I was saying.
“Yeah, that’s true,” she responded. “Okay, let’s just know it’s going to happen since hope makes it seem like we don’t believe it’s going to happen.”
We grew apart.
From that day forward, I gave up hope. Honestly, I’d given up hope long before that day. I was just speaking what was already in my heart. I had no hope. My mom died the year before I had that talk with my friend. No one understood my dreams like my mom. Although my mom was more critical than anything, she knew I was capable of making my dreams come true, as well as hers. I wanted that more than anything.
When she died, the dreams seemed to die with her. It was true. Something died, but it wasn’t the dream, and it was more than my mom – it was our shared, unspoken dreams. She’d never really shared any dreams she had for me, in detail. I believe she gave up on hers before I was born. So. her only hope was that I’d marry a rich man so that I would have to “worry about nothing.” I have to admit that was a nice dream, but it wasn’t realistic based on the way she raised me.
My mom was a single parent who had a black Cinderella dream for her daughter, without the evil stepmother.
She wanted the fairy tale, not only for me, but for herself, too – not that we didn’t deserve it, but we didn’t need it. I was determined to become “somebody“. I had no idea that this was my goal. I would have never guessed that I didn’t think I was somebody already.
Mom knew my dreams: what I wanted to do, who I wanted to meet, and how far I wanted to go. She knew it, but we never talked about it. I don’t know if she thought I could get it without a man or if she wanted me to do it, alone. All we knew was that I was capable. Perhaps, I was limited by her own limited ideas of herself. I felt stifled by her need to control me. My dreams couldn’t flourish very well. This is why having God is so important.
While we were on pause, my friend thrived in many areas of her life. She wasn’t struggling with her faith and hope in the Lord. I, on the other hand, struggled, badly. This isn’t me comparing my life with hers. We had completely different upbringings that brought different challenges.
When I began to surrender to God, I didn’t know which way to go, or when. I had to ask the Lord for every single direction. I was afraid of making a mistake (sinning). When I did sin, I condemned myself and thought it was God hating me. I lived this way for a really long time.
