By Samantha Beidoun
I had three big dreams for my adult life: to be married, to have one more child planned within a marriage, and to live at a location that was within walking distance to most necessities. In the winter of 2020, I had a deep soulful conversation with my reflection. My boyfriend was obsessing over motorcycles and marriage seemed off-putting to him. I told myself that I needed to drop the idea of being a bride because honestly, we were fine. If marriage didn’t make sense to him, then I would drop the subject forever, and live in peace knowing that I had the best guy around for me and my children. Two weeks later I was wearing a sapphire ring with aquamarine and peridot accent stones (the kids’ birthstones) on my left hand, and by that summer we had a small wedding in our backyard. I was a wife!
At this point I had dropped the idea of having any more children. A perk to having my other two in my early twenties was that we could be empty nesters as soon as our late 30s and that idea was starting to settle well. I set my 31st birthday as my cut off marker for having any more babies. However, the idea of growing a family became appealing to my husband, and I extended the cutoff age for myself, and we welcomed our first child together five months after my 31st birthday. Life dream number two achieved!
And then at some point, my husband and I weren’t in the starry-eyed, blissed state anymore. We were off from the high of our first year of marriage in which nine of those twelve months I was pregnant. The second-year excitement of the new baby, and my husband’s official adoption of my older kids had worn away, and we retreated back into our regular daily dysfunctions. We were in the depths of parenting and diapering and in the hard reality of a failed attempt to sell our house that I had wanted out of for years.
We were driving back and forth from our home in Grass Lake to the kids’ schools and friends and extracurriculars in Dexter and jobs in Ann Arbor. We were just driving, and driving, and driving, and I craved to belong somewhere. I didn’t feel like I was a part of any community. We slept in one town, but our lives were being lived in another. We were learning how to parent a child together, the world was starting to become more stabilized after the pandemic, but we were just sort of stuck in the “figuring out of what normal was” in our collaboration of this legally bound team. With navigating how to balance time for us and our children, while still being our own selves, and not feeling settled about where home was, life seemed overwhelming.
One day we found ourselves with an unexpected opportunity–the kids weren’t home with us, and it was my husband’s day off work. We decided it would do us good to get out of the house and reconnect. We started at Matthaei Botanical Gardens. It was early May and not a lot was blooming outside, but we enjoyed the fresh air with the dry dirt beneath our feet surrounded bythe budding trees and glimpses of green poking up all around. And then at the end of our little trek, there was one tree that was fully in bloom and making its presence known. It was a magnolia tree, and I was totally entranced by its magenta pink hues that faded into the white tips of the petals.
“If we ever move, I want a magnolia tree in the yard,” I stated. We both had a glimmer of desire for trying to move again but didn’t talk too seriously about it since just a couple of days prior we semi-agreed on waiting a couple more years. With the not so favored memories of the difficulties that trying to sell a house and find a house brought, we decided to go to Misfit Coffee and connect over different topics. We sat in the front window with our beautiful lattes and shared conversation and the most perfectly frosted donut. I remember rambling about silly things between pauses in my husband’s car talk, like how cool the element of copper is and how I just learned that if you stick a penny at the bottom of a vase of tulips they won’t droop. It was then that we were interrupted by a call to come look at a house that wasn’t technically on the market yet. It was a lead from a friend, and the homeowner was willing to have us come check out his place.
I was apprehensive. We weren’t really looking anymore after the previous summer’s stress and heartbreak. I didn’t want to feel that defeat or get excited over another house just to lose it again. And the house was in a subdivision! My introverted self never thought that I would be okay living in a place where I could see everyone else’s space and maybe have to give a friendly wave to someone when outside getting the mail. But maybe looking at this house, with not enough space for my husband’s cars, but enough space for all three kids to live more comfortably, would be worth looking at.
We got to the house and right when we pulled up there was a beautiful magnolia tree in bloom. Its brilliant soft magenta pink and white petals reached up toward the sky, greeting us with a friendly and firm open-petaled welcome. I swallowed down this sign from the universe that this was our house. I tried to tell myself this wasn’t a sign—it was just a coincidence. We walked around the house that was far more functional in its layout than our house was and at the backdoor was a small terrier who we were introduced to as Copper. We left and I couldn’t believe that a magnolia tree and a dog could have just restored all my hope for my future and sparked some excitement that I had perfected in burying deep. Was this supposed to be our house? Was I being called to living on less acreage and smiling at neighbors? My driving would be almost entirely eliminated if we lived there. The kids could walk or ride their bikes to school. It was within walking and biking distance to the downtown, to the grocery store, to our doctors, to restaurants, to a therapy office! There was a public playground right off the backyard and the friendliest group of neighbors. It even came with most of the main furniture for a very small extra price. It was all too good.
We decided to try this moving thing again, and by some miracle, our house sold, and we were in the process of taking over the ownership of the Dexter house within one week of our magnolia tree encounter. It’s been almost a year since, and my husband and I are still in awe at how unbelievably smooth the transition went.
I don’t allow myself to get excited about much. My heart doesn’t handle disappointment and hurt well, so I guard it and don’t let the positive emotions flow through easily in case they get crushed; Yet, I can say that I am solidly excited realization that I made it; I managed to have all of my big dreams come true.
I don’t have the exact formula for how to make dreams come true, but I will say that a chat with your reflection might make an impact. Copper is a fruitful source and dogs named after it might be guiding you to luck. Acknowledge when the trees and blooms are calling out to you. Call them beautiful, and thank them for the air, and for sudden and wished for life changes. It’s easy to get sucked into what isn’t making sense and what hurts, but good things are always waiting to be unveiled in the least likely of times.
Samantha Beidoun is a stay at home mom of three, who loves to share meaning of small moments and nature’s whispers. She enjoys writing personal essays, reading, cooking, and raising monarchs.
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Earlier this year, we celebrated our daughter’s 30th birthday with a small ritual that has long been a tradition in our family. On every birthday, and on our wedding anniversary, we make time to review some of the best moments of the previous year. Since this was a significant birthday for our daughter, we upped the ante. This time we reviewed the highlights of the past thirty years! Unachievable in a week, preposterous in an hour. Still, we tried. Over a leisurely, celebratory breakfast, the three of us recalled and reminisced about favorite family vacations and outings, special concerts—ones we played, ones we attended—plays we’d seen, books we’d read, graduations, weddings, and other milestones. And we laughed about misadventures that were not funny at the time but have, with the passage of time, become hilarious.