Recently, someone mentioned a deck of cards meant to be used as a journaling exercise: The Remarkable Life Deck: A Ten-Year Plan For Achieving Your Dreams. Much of the deck is focused on creative visualization - imagining, if you removed self-imposed restrictions on what you think you can’t do or isn’t realistic, what your life would look like in ten years, rich with detail. I love the concept and also I’m just a sucker for a pretty deck of cards (which is also how I developed a tarot habit).
I’ve always had a vivid imagination and an active fantasy life. (At age 6, I had an imaginary friend named Anna that I apparently described in such detail that my first-grade teacher asked my parents if she was real.) One of the things I’ve been trying to push myself to do lately, when I get stuck on a particular fantasy, is to think about what’s in the fantasy that I feel isn’t in my life as it is in that moment and what I might be able to do to bring the two a little closer together. So I thought I might do a little writing about some of the prompts in the deck, though I chose to go for straight description rather than enumerating which bits belong to which prompt (some blend together anyway). Some of the prompts are a little too personal to share publicly, but some of them I think are fun to put out there.
I’m very keenly aware of the limits of this kind of exercise. As the old saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. If I had done this a year or two ago, some of it wouldn’t look the same at all, though I think many elements would overlap. That’s okay, though. It’s an interesting exercise to think about what I really want, what I would do if I could do anything, and if what I want changes over time that is perfectly fine.
So, ten years from now…
I’ve got a house somewhere near Hartford, maybe in West Hartford or Windsor or Newington. Close enough I can take the bus to work if I want to, and walkable to the nearest elementary school and a few restaurants and shops. The lot is small, probably less than a quarter acre - who wants to spend all their time mowing the lawn? A little fenced-in yard with just enough space for a grill, an outdoor dining set, and a spot for the dogs to go out is perfect. There’s lots of space for dining, cozy chairs and sofas in the living room, and a wood-burning fireplace we love to use in the winter. I have a home office, maybe in a shed I’ve converted for the purpose.
I’ve painted all the walls bright colors and there’s a mishmash of artwork all over the place - pictures I liked so much I had them framed, nice oil paintings I probably spent too much on, things I impulse-bought at craft fairs or Target or on Etsy. There’s books all over the place, mine and my partner’s and our kids’, and we have a little vinyl collection in the living room but still listen to everything on Spotify. I refuse to HGTV-ify my house, but I have made some upgrades. Solar panels on the roof, replacing gas heat and cooking with a geothermal heat pump and an induction stove, a rain garden in the front yard outside - trying to do my little part to be gentle on the planet.
I learned how to play the guitar and the piano, and I have both in the house. I grab one of them when the stress feels like it’s too much and play some of my favorite songs until I feel better. I have a membership at the Y, and as hard as it can be to make time to go, at least once a week I swim laps or attend an aqua fitness class. It’s good to have a fitness routine, yes, but far more importantly being in the water just makes me happy. I still write, but I don’t try to make money off it, I just write what I want when I want. Maybe in a public blog like this one (though who knows what the state of blogging and the Internet will be in 2033) or maybe just in a journal I keep to myself.
I’m working for the government, doing labor and employment law. Maybe at the National Labor Relations Board or in the Connecticut Attorney General’s office, handling worker’s compensation and wage theft cases, and I like my job. I have good benefits, a salary I can live on without sweating the bills, and I get to work from home a couple of days a week. I feel good about what I’m doing, protecting workers, and the work is usually interesting. I like doing investigations and writing up my findings, though the times I have to show up in a suit for oral arguments still make me a little nervous and the layers of bureaucracy, so different from working on campaigns, is sometimes annoying. But my job isn’t my identity like it used to be. I do my 40 hours a week and go home, and I sympathize with my former law school classmates working long hours at fancy law firms but also secretly feel a little smug that I didn’t walk that path.
I don’t do much with politics. I pay attention to the news and I vote in every election, which I consider my civic duty and will do until my dying day, but that’s about it. Sometimes I think I should maybe go to some Democratic Town Committee meetings or do some campaign volunteering or something, but I’ve almost always got more interesting things to do and I figure I’ve paid my dues several times over. Democracy will, I hope, keep on chugging along without me making it my life.
I have a wife, who in the present day I haven’t met yet (or maybe I have and I don’t know it? Not currently dating anyone though). Maybe I met her in law school, but more likely I met her online or in CT’s queer community. I imagine her as having curly hair, maybe red or maybe dark, and beautiful curves and full hips. If I didn’t meet her in law school, I think she works in a caring profession - teaching or social work or nursing. She knows what it is to need to work for more than a paycheck. She has a few tattoos and she has a creative hobby - maybe she knits or draws or sculpts, she likes to have something to do with her hands. She loves sports like I do and we watch them together, yelling at the TV and then laughing at ourselves for it after, going to games together.
She’s full of kindness and love and enthusiasm for life, but doesn’t let that stop her from having a biting, sarcastic sense of humor that leaves me in stitches. She’s a little more outgoing than me (let’s be real, she’d have to be, or I’m not sure how we’d ever end up talking to each other) but not so social that I find it overwhelming. She’s also more of a free spirit. I’m the planner in the relationship, making the budgets and spreadsheets and reservations, and she respects that but also gently nudges me to be a little more impulsive sometimes. We share the chores as equally as we can - I cook and do the laundry and take the trash out, and she’ll do the dishes and does more of the tidying up (though I try not to be too much of a trash panda). She’s not a heavy drinker, but on Fridays we get takeout instead of cooking and pick up a bottle of wine. We share a glass or two and toast the end of the week. When the anxiety attacks hit and I don’t know what to do, she curls herself up against me and holds me as tight as she can until I feel like I can breathe again.
We spend a weekend or two apart each year - maybe she likes camping (many queer ladies do, though I find the very idea horrifying, we as a species invented beds for a reason), or she goes to a convention for her hobby, or I wander off to a concert that isn’t to her taste. We enjoy the weekend apart, relishing in the time alone, pampering ourselves, and eating foods we know the other wouldn’t like, and when I see her again on Sunday afternoon I’m the happiest I can imagine anyone being to have her back.
There were two moments when I knew she was The One. One of them was when we started to have more serious conversations about long-term goals, moving on from the “I like you and we’re having so much fun together” phase to the “are we compatible long-term?” phase, I told her I wanted to be a foster parent, and her eyes lit up like I’d never seen before. The other was when we took a road trip together, our first couple vacation. I held her hand while I was driving and we sang along (terribly, or at least I did) to some song on one of my playlists and I just knew there was no one else in the world I’d rather be doing this with. We waited to get married until I finished law school and got a job, so we’d have enough money for a wedding with all our families and friends together. We delighted in finding ways we, as two ladies getting married, could say “fuck you” to old patriarchial traditions, but we also decided we really wanted to share a name (whoever’s is easier to spell/pronounce, so probably hers) so everyone knows we’re a family.
We don’t have any biological kids, but we’re foster parents together. Two kids we either adopted out of foster care or are long-term fostering, hopefully a sibling pair we wanted to keep together. I would be thrilled to have any child, but a little part of me hopes they’re both girls. We have a spare bedroom in the house that’s sometimes for guests but is really so that we can take in emergency short-term and respite foster care placements too. (The mortgage is probably a little higher than would really be sensible so we can have that 4th bedroom, but we both agreed it was 100% worth it.)
On days I work from home, I walk the kids to school before I clock in in the morning and take a late lunch break to pick them up, and though I know they have to grow up someday and go to the middle and high schools further away, I know how much I’ll miss those walks. My wife and I tell our kids they have to pick something extracurricular to be involved in, a club at school or a sport, but what it is is entirely up to them, and they can do as much or as little as they want and we’ll support them. We try our best to enforce the “no phones at dinnertime” rule so we all talk to each other, but we’re only human so that rule probably gets broken once in a while. We know that kids coming in from foster care may need more physical and behavioral health care than the average kid, and we’d move heaven and earth to make sure we’re meeting those needs. More than anything, we do our best to be present in our kids’ lives, to encourage them in whatever they want to do, and to keep our word to them. We try not to spoil them, but sometimes we just can’t help ourselves.
Part of me wants to imagine what our kids would be like - what their interests are, how they spend their time, what they dream of doing when they grow up. But the thing about kids is that they’re going to insist on being themselves, what they want is probably something their parents can’t even imagine, and it does no one any good for parents to impose their own life wishes on their kids. I hope to always give them the freedom to be themselves and explore their interests (safely!) and that they feel they can trust me with their hopes and dreams.
We love to travel together as a family and take at least one big vacation every year. If the kids like motorsports too, maybe we pick a Formula One Grand Prix sometime during the summer and take them to visit the country it’s in, building a longer sightseeing trip to the country around the race weekend. We’ll do the obligatory Disney World trip with the kids sometime (and probably enjoy it as adults too), but once they’re a little older, we’ll take them everywhere we can, showing them museums and performances and cuisines and nature and everything else we can think of.
We have pets, too - two dogs and a cat, perhaps. Even in fantasy, I have to admit that Molly probably won’t live to 21 years old (she’s 11 now), and though it will shatter me when she does go, having a dog is so good for me that I would need to adopt another one once I’d had a little time to grieve. I’ve come to love big dogs after my family owned a St. Bernard when I was a kid - maybe I’d have a Great Dane or a Bernese mountain dog like my sister Mary’s. I love pugs and bulldogs, too, and I could see myself with one of those. Or perhaps I fell in love with a specific shelter dog from a breed I never imagined having before (after all, this is how Molly and I rescued each other). Either way, I hope they’re lovebugs that play fetch now and then but also love a lazy afternoon cuddling on the couch with their people. I haven’t done this yet in the present day since I’m not sure how Molly would take it, but I would also love to have a kitty in the house someday.
We sponsor a refugee family living in the area, helping them get settled in Connecticut and inviting them over for dinner every so often, and we volunteer at a local food bank to help make packages for families in need, because we believe (literally and figuratively) in “If you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence.”
I visit my family pretty often on weekends, and if my wife’s family is nearby, we visit hers too - it’s nice to live right where seeing family is an easy trip, but not so easy that they can drop in unexpectedly. We spoil our nieces and nephews if we have them and we shamelessly borrow my parents’ car while we’re there so we can claim we’re residents and use the local beaches in summer. We don’t have many close friends, but the ones we do are like family to us. We love to host our people, biological and chosen family, for any occasion - Fourth of July cookouts, Thanksgiving feasts, Super Bowl parties, whatever excuse we feel like to show our people we love them by inviting them into our home and feeding them delicious things. We have folding tables in storage that we drag out to make sure there’s room for everyone and we always cook extra just in case someone unexpected comes along.
We have enough money to feel secure and save a little for a rainy day. We do automatic transfers to retirement savings, the kids’ college funds, and emergency savings every paycheck - even if it’s not much, saving what we can is important, and we know it works best if we do it right away and act like we never had that money. We try to be frugal and track our spending so we don’t sweat the bills, but money isn’t for hoarding, it’s for living. If a piece of art or a toy for the kids or paying someone else to take an annoying chore off our plate or a travel experience is a little more than the usual monthly budget, we dip into those savings and are grateful we can.
It’s a simple life, but a full one, and I’m grateful for it in ways I can’t even begin to describe.