Our American Dream, Unrealized
Prologue
Contrary to popular belief, The American Dream isn’t one size fits all and honestly, we weren’t sure it fit us at all anymore.
Like so many before us, we loved the idea, the beautiful dream version of a life we could live. To achieve such a dream we did everything in the “right order” and checked all the boxes, one after another.
We went to school, graduated, got full time jobs and met each other at work. We started dating, got married, bought a house, bought new cars and paid all our bills on time. We did all the things and we “lived”.
Or so we thought.
In order to afford our cars, our home and all the things that went inside it, we worked eight plus hours a day, five days a week. We spent most of our time working to pay for it all and didn’t actually get to enjoy any of it because we were too busy working! How backwards is that?
We had a new house with a nice yard that we manicured to the correct number of inches as per our HOA agreement that we never used because it needed to stay pristine.
It’s not such a crazy concept when you think about it, everyone has probably heard someone yell stay off the grass at some point in their life. We’ve all seen those little signs in front yards warning everyone to stay away from that lush green goodness. Please don’t walk on the grass and whatever you do, don’t let the kids play on it! It’s even worse if a dog pees on it because then the grass starts to turn yellow and die. In the end, it was just safer if we didn’t let anyone use it at all just to keep it looking nice.
Which begs the question: Why have it at all? Why did we put so much effort into mowing, weeding, edging and fertilizing if we didn’t use it for anything? Because it looked nice, of course. Unnaturally so. But it was the thing to do and so we did it. It’s all part of the dream right?
This conditioning begins from the time we are born and as we grow up we’re constantly asked what do we want to be when we grow up. Not what do we want to do, not where do we want to go, but what do we want to be be. What job do we want to start working as soon as we’re old enough so we can finally begin making payments on the lifetime of debt we’re going to accumulate chasing our version of The American Dream.
Now, don’t get me wrong, things are great, things are fun, some things are even vital and of course we need money to buy those things, thus, we need to work to make money. It really is a vicious cycle, but why does that get to define who we are?
When someone asks what we do, why do we always answer with whatever our job is? Why don’t we list off the things we love to do with the people we love to do them with, the places we’ve been or want to go? You know, the stuff that actually makes us feel alive?
Our first shift in perspective began when my husband Nick and I started a fitness journey back in 2013 in an effort to lose weight and live a more active lifestyle. At first we just walked around the neighborhood and eventually upped our walking game when we found a great bike path that ran around the river. Fresh river air and exercise? Yes, please! But walking on concrete isn’t so great long term so in order to stay active and give our feet a break, we decided to try a few local day hikes and absolutely fell in love with it. We were hooked!
Once we started hiking, the itch to get out there and find new places to explore became insatiable, we were hungry for more! Where else could we go, what else could we do?
Before long we bought a cheap stationary bike and started riding it twenty miles a day. Yes, you read that right, twenty miles. What can I say, we were determined! As you can imagine, we dropped to our goal weights very quickly but like walking on concrete, biking exclusively indoors isn’t so great long term so we evolved again.
Without knowing much of anything or exactly what we were looking for we went out and bought ourselves a couple of mountain bikes. There would be no stopping us now!
Every night after work we’d ride the stationary bike inside and dream of where the trail could take us on our next day off and when the weekend rolled around, we’d load up the bikes and ride the bike path around the river.
One loop was 12 miles but before long that wasn’t enough and we began challenging ourselves. Could we ride it twice? Three times? Our record was biking 41 miles in one day! Sounds exhausting I know, but honestly, we’ve never had more energy in our lives!
It was a game changer when we discovered bike trails that weren’t made out of concrete. Riding on dirt trails was a new challenge and a whole new level of bliss. We loved weaving in and around the tall trees, riding with dirt beneath our tires, breathing in all that fresh air as the dust trailed out behind us.
Between hiking and biking, suddenly the weekends weren’t enough anymore. There was so much we wanted to do, so many places we wanted to go but working five out of seven days on alternating schedules doesn’t give you nearly enough time to do anything. Before we knew it, we had become weekend warriors and our entire work week was spent pining for the freedom of our next day off so we could get out there and do something that really made us feel alive.
That’s when we started to question our version of the American Dream. Was it enough? Was this really what we wanted? Was it even working?
It was time for another evolution and a new adventure so we expanded our adventuring duo and adopted an adorable eight week old German Shepherd puppy we named Crixus. We purposely picked his breed because we wanted a dog that could keep up with us and we thought he would make great adventure buddy as he grew up and got bigger.
It’s unbelievable how fast puppies grow and entirely too soon our adorable little black fluffball transformed himself into our beautiful big red dog. Just like we hoped, Crixus was all about that adventure life and there was nothing he loved better than loading up to go explore with us.
One and one and one is three! With the addition of our first son Atlas, the world suddenly shifted into a whole new focus. A newborn baby with barely one year old giant puppy? It was a chaos! But it was our chaos and it was beautiful.
Everyone said our adventures would end once the baby came but that couldn’t be true, could it? To us it felt natural to just add Atlas into our adventures. Anywhere we go, he goes so why not on a trail somewhere? Traveling with a baby certainly changes the way you adventure, but it doesn’t have to put a stop to it and we figured out a new normal pretty quickly.
We couldn’t bike as much anymore with a new baby on board, which was very bitter sweet. On the one hand, we loved biking and totally missed it, but on the other hand, taking Atlas out hiking with us was an absolute delight so we didn’t miss it too much.
We started out slow but as usual for us, things progressed pretty quickly and as soon as Atlas could hold his head up we were graduating from a soft structured Ergo Baby carrier to the Osprey Poco Plus Child Carrier. It was quite possibly the greatest invention ever to hit the baby world!
With that baby carrier we really were unstoppable and we hit the trail as often as we could, baby in tow. Atlas spent most of his first two years riding high above the world on his Daddy’s back where he took some of his best naps ever as the many miles we hiked lulled him into the soundest of sleep. Atlas absolutely loved loading up into his pack and we loved taking him out on adventures with us. Watching the world through his eyes was nothing short of magic.
Nick worked full time and I dropped to part time to stay at home during the day with Atlas. Every night, minutes after Nick would get home, I’d leave to go to work and it would be his turn to stay home. We were like two ships passing in the night. Hi honey, welcome home. Bye honey, I’m off to work.
There just wasn’t enough time in the day and we struggled to make sense of it all. One thing we knew for certain was that family is life, experience is life, adventure is life and working forty hours a week just doesn’t give you enough time to live. But man did we try!
Every weekend we would load up the car with what felt like half the house, the baby and the dog and then we’d drive somewhere new to have a little adventure. We were weekend warriors fighting the good fight but it was a losing battle.
Fast forward 3 years to when we welcomed our second son, Fenix, and life as we knew it changed again.
Being pregnant the second time is exhausting but it’s got nothing on a sleepless life with a colicky newborn, a three year old, a giant dog, full time jobs and a whole lot of adult responsibility.
Time was at an all time premium and with two little ones in the house everything became harder and more complicated and we stopped making the effort. Suddenly there were a million easy excuses to just stay at home.
The baby is too little.
The baby has colic. (Boy did he ever!)
It’s too cold.
We were too tired. (Man were we ever!)
And if you’ve ever traveled with small children you already know the enormous effort it takes just to load the insane amount of stuff you might need.
Our list of why not to go out was endless and at the end of the day, it was always going to be easier and more comfortable to stay on the couch than it would be to load up the car with half the house and the kids who will just scream for the whole car ride anyway.
Each day blurred into the next and we were clocking in and out like mindless zombies on auto pilot, suffering in silence. Nick was still working full time, sometimes more, because to afford all the things with an extra two mouths to feed, he accepted as much overtime as they offered, even if he only got 3 hours of sleep the night before because the colic monster was up every hour screaming.
Fenix eventually grew out of the colic stage and little by little as we finally started to feel human again, we began going on little adventures once more. It was a whole new level of chaos going out with two kids and a dog so we took our time figuring out our crazy new normal.
There is something about being in outside in nature that just speaks to our souls so once we got started again, there was no slowing us down.
We bought a second child carrier, this time a Deuter Kid Comfort and we hit the trail as often as time allowed. Fenix was much older than Atlas was when we started hiking with him but just like his brother, he loved riding high above the world soaking in the beautiful sights around us.
Children really do see magic and watching the world through not one but two sets of eyes made everything brand new again and we suddenly understood that this life wasn’t just about us anymore. That realization opened a whole new perspective and it was exactly the fuel we had been looking for to reignite the fire inside us. Burning brighter than ever, we were wide awake now, determined to never let excuses rule our lives again.
There was so many places we wanted to go, so many things we wanted to show the boys but there was still so little time. Our work schedules dominated all other things and we struggled to balance responsibility with our larger than life dreams.
We did the job with that fake soulless smile on our faces (you know the one) because it paid money and we needed money to buy this life. But did we want this life anymore, one where we spent more time at work than we did with our family? Was all this really worth it?
After giving it some serious thought we figured that our mortgage was our biggest expense by far and the main reason we needed to work. By that logic, if we didn’t keep a traditional home that required said mortgage payment what other bills could we eliminate? There was electricity, garbage, water, sewer, cable and an internet bill so if we no longer needed those services how much money did we actually need to live?
Could it be as simple as living a smaller life?
Ask yourself the same question, the answer might just surprise you.
After living our own version of The American Dream for years, reality hit and we realized it just didn’t fit us anymore. We were bored out of our minds ready to break free from the cycle. We felt restless but we weren’t sure why or what exactly we were looking for, we just knew we wanted something different. It was like an itch we couldn’t scratch and it was driving us crazy!
A life with the kind of freedom we craved wouldn’t come without sacrifice of course, there’s always a give and take for everything. We gain some, we lose some. Still, we questioned ourselves, we already had it all, did we really want to start all over again? Did we really need more?
The answer to that query was a resounding yes. Not only did we want more, we needed more and at the very least we definitely deserved more and sometimes in order to have more, we actually need less.
We wanted to show our children, not just tell them, that there is more to life than working until you hit retirement age when you’re too old to go out and have all the adventures you put off having when you were young because you were too busy working.
The world certainly wasn’t going to hand it to us, if we really wanted it, we would have to take it. Life is for the living and it was long past time we started acting like we were actually alive. Today not someday. Right now.
And so…
We went.
