Look at All These Wishes
On dandelions, five-year-olds, and the things we choose to see
Wednesday is family night. It started last year, after the move, after my divorce was finalized, after everything. A non-negotiable island in the week where I don’t stay late and work, I don’t worry what’s for dinner, the laundry can wait, the dust bunnies will be there tomorrow... where we pick up where we left off, the three of us. Me and my two boys. My youngest loves mini golf. I do too, and his older brother is competitive enough that it’s a great family activity. There’s an outdoor course I like, and you park across the street and walk through this open field to get to the entrance. It’s a small thing. It became our thing.
On this particular Wednesday I was on empty. The kind of tired that isn’t really about sleep. It’s the cognitive and emotional load of work that never ends, a house still becoming a home, the ever-present math of co-parenting, where no matter how you divide the calendar someone is always missing someone. I love being a mom. I love my work. I didn’t have kids to be okay with not seeing them every day, and yet here we are, and I’m told this is just how it goes, and most days I’ve made my peace with that, and some days I haven’t. That day I hadn’t.
I tell my kids: if you look for the bad, you’ll find it. And that’s all you’ll see. So why not look for the good? I believe this. I have built a life on this. It is not toxic positivity. It’s the understanding that perspective is almost always a choice, and choosing it is a practice, and some days the practice is harder than others. I often tell my kids you always have a choice. Sometimes it’s just your attitude, but it’s still yours to decide.
That day, crossing the field to the mini golf entrance, holding my youngest’s
hand on my right, my oldest on my left, my whole world on either side of me. I looked at the lawn and without even meaning to, my brain defaulted to a silent thought: look at all these weeds. This lawn really needs maintenance.
My thoughts of manual weed-plucking labor were interrupted as my five-year-old exclaimed without pause, throwing open his arms wide and shouting with pure joy...
“Look at ALL these WISHES!”
The field wasn’t bright yellow. They were at that in-between stage, all gone to seed, every one of them a white globe, just waiting. Waiting for the wind to carry them away. The kind you pick and hold up and blow as hard as you can, squeezing your eyes shut, making a wish so specific and so sincere that you can feel it. And you count the seeds flying off, because at five you know... you absolutely know, that if you blow every single last one, the wish comes true. Magic is not metaphor when you are five. It just... is.
I can’t tell that story without my eyes prickling with the threat of tears. He didn’t see a lawn that needed maintenance, a thing to be managed. He saw a hundred chances to try to make his dreams come true. He saw wonder and a hundred opportunities. Where I defaulted to a problem, he unequivocally saw possibility.
That is the magic of children before the world gets to them. Before it teaches them hierarchy, before it shows them that things don’t always work out, before disappointment and unfairness and hard experience start training the brain to scan for threats first. Kids live in a world where dandelions are wishes and the magic is simply, factually real. That worldview is not naivety. It is the clearest seeing there is. And we spend our whole lives, if we’re lucky, trying to find our way back to it.
I have a funny thing in my head about dandelions. They’re medicinal. The yellow is alive and cheerful. I have always half-wanted to let them grow, make dandelion wine, dandelion tea, little bright bouquets and flower wreaths... and yet I pull them anyway, because of some unspoken contract with the neighborhood about what a lawn should look like and how things should be.
James Allen wrote something I read two decades ago that has lived rent-free in my head ever since: “The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colors which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.” I have turned that sentence over in my mind a thousand times. I love kaleidoscopes. When I was little, my dad brought back this beautiful, ornate one for my sister from Turkey while serving overseas during a six-month deployment. I would sneak into her room and spin the dials, one for flowers and one for colors, and move the scope around, watching the different angles of light change the reality of what was in front of me. And at almost forty, I needed my five-year-old, standing in a field of a hundred white wishes, to remind me of what’s really important in life.
Perspective isn’t just the lens you choose. It’s the first concept you reach for in any given moment. It’s a practice. A practice you build slowly, over time. A retraining of your mind and your default network from everything that’s happened to you, or rather, for you, over years on this floating rock we call earth. It can be rebuilt, if we choose to. That’s what he reminded me of that day.
I burned that moment into my memory. My two children at vastly different stages of their lives, and me at my own crossroads, all three of us proof that the lens in which we view our world is ours to pick. That you can build and reshape what you focus on, what has meaning and purpose and space in your life. That everything can be magic in its own right, regardless of age or circumstance.
So now, every time I see a dandelion, I’m pulled back to that moment. And what I see is...
A wish. A hundred of them, actually. More than enough.