Evangeline Lilly Instagram – I feel so lucky to be able to stand at a sink with running, warm water and beautiful smelling soap, and wash my dishes and let my mind wander. I think about how happy I am with my life-choices and how lucky I am that I’m happy with my life choices. How happy I am that I’ve said “no” to more jobs than I’ve said “yes” to. How happy I am that I’m bringing my kids up in a mixed neighbour hood, with low-income neighbors. That most of their best friends live on the proverbial “other side of the track” and that my kids don’t bat an eye at that as wealthy, affluent children of a celebrity actress. How happy I am that I have pursued my dreams and my happiness even when it cost me fame and fortune. I think about how I’m at that time in parenting where the reality of raising human beings has beaten my idealism out of me; how I started this “job” with such enormously aspirational and idealistic ideas about how I would raise people and what kind of people I would raise. And then those people came along, and kicked my ass, and told me that it’s not really up to me, that there’s a very limited percentage of who they are that I really can influence, and that there is a limit to my skill and capacity at influencing. And now, it’s starting to feel like relationship instead of like molding and shaping; if feels like we’re all in this together, the kids, dad, our community and me, trying to figure it out, groping along as we go. #gratitude #parenting #workingmom #career #dreams