Childhood Dreams...

I've got a great job. A very cool job. In moments, I am reminded of it. When my husband basks with pride when asked why he has so many Super Bowl shirts. When I read about my day to day life and the issues I address in the New York Times. When someone visits the office and their chin drops just a little.

It is a dream job, but not necessarily my dream job. Don't get me wrong -- it is in the top 5. Top 10 at worst. But it is not the one.

The dream job -- my dream job -- is being a star in a music video. Not just any music video, but the one that focuses in on the woman. The face of the woman. Her expressions, while some deep, meaningful, slightly melancholy song plays in the background. I would be the face the camera zooms in on, shows from different angles. The face that shows all the different expressions that reflect all those deep emotions embodied by the words and music of the song.

When I was so young I don't remember, I am told I would spend hours in front of my parents mirrored closests, just looking at myself and acting. When I was not so young that I do remember -- for example, junior high and high school -- I would always spend time in the bathroom, with the door closed, doing what Tyra would now call "mirror time." I would investigate the expressions I could make. I would watch the depth of my eyes. I would imagine my favorite love song (we know there are many!) -- and think of the feeling of unrequited love, confusing love, self doubt that I knew so well in life -- and pretend the camera was zoomed in on me. I'd watch the faces that I would use to express the song and my feelings. My faces. My expressions.

This likely explains why these past three days of being at home -- having pushed up the start of my "leave" by a couple days, after having been sick at the end of last week and spending some quality time at the hospital getting fluids with no mirror to pass time in front of -- I find myself playing songs and opening up PhotoBooth and pretending, again, that I am "the face" of the video. I am the face of the video for "If Its The Beaches," by The Avett Brothers (if you watch Friday Night Lights...which you should...you'll recognize the song. If you don't, you'll love the song and realize you should be watching the show). I am the face of "You'll Think of Me" by Keith Urban. I am the face of every song on iTunes (except Derek's techno and electronic music that he uses for his classes, which don't deserve a face).

I laugh at myself. What a silly thing to take pleasure in. But I enjoyed doing this when I was 3, when I was 10, when I was 18, when I was 25 -- and it still brings me pleasure. It is something inside of me -- something that has always been inside of me -- that makes this somehow fun, somehow cathartic. It brings something out of me that my real job doesn't. The romantic in me. The emotional me. The part of me that wants to find the complex in the simple and the simple in the complex. That thinks the eyes really are the window to each person's soul. The parts of me that life doesn't change no matter what I go through, no matter what I learn, no matter where I am. It is those parts of my son -- those that will remain unchanged and untarnished his entire life -- that I am excited to meet and get to know once he arrives and as I watch him grow up.

It will never happen. I know that I will pass through this life without ever being in a music video. I won't be the girl in Chris Isaak's Wicked Games. I know that. But the pretending is something I just can't outgrow.