As a general rule, the months following the birth of a first baby are not a great time for decision-making. It’s a foggy, hazy time, in which the focus is solely on survival – the baby’s and yours, in that order.

One of the more questionable decisions I made during that time was an ill-advised purchase of a wall decal from Zulily. It was a giant, intricately-designed rocket, with the words “DREAM BIG.” If you’ve ever hung one of those wall decals, you know how deceptively complicated that shit is. It requires a surprising amount of coordination and the use of both fine and gross motor skills. It took two parents and many curse words to get the thing hung.

It didn’t take long for me to get tired of looking at it, and eventually I painstakingly peeled it off, wearing down a thumbnail in the process. My husband, bless his heart, said very little when I took it down, considering what a pain in the ass it had been to put it up.

The biggest reason I grew to dislike it, aside from my mom’s suggestion that its diagrammatic design looked like something out of a Cold War-era brainwashing experiment, was the words “DREAM BIG.” It seemed like such a big request of such a little guy. Of course my son could not read it, but I could, and I decided that wasn’t really a message I wanted to send as a parent.

Scrolling through design websites and flipping through parenting magazines, we see examples of this everywhere. “The sky’s the limit.” “Aim high.” “Reach for the stars.” (By now it should be evident that we went with an “air and space” theme for our son’s room.) They are intended to be inspirational. We want to instill in our children a sense that they can be anything they want, if they “dream big.” By hanging these signs, posters and decals in their rooms, we are encouraging them to be their best selves. Aren’t we?

I’m not so sure now. Are we inadvertently asking too much? Setting up unreasonable expectations? Sending a message that “big” is the only acceptable way to dream? Is it okay to dream medium?

Where is the line between empowering our children to believe in themselves, and setting them up to be dissatisfied? What does success look like? Who defines greatness? How big is big enough? How do we strike a balance in the messages we send our children – and ourselves – about achievement?

After my first blog post, I received a stunning number of messages from people saying “Me, too!” I am not the only one who feels like I fall short of the mark, whatever the mark is. It was really something to discover I am not alone.

Much has been written about women and the idea of “having it all.” I’m not talking about that. If you want to read about that, Ann Marie Slaughter says it better than I ever could. I’m talking a different, but tangentially related, phenomenon. So many of us grew up believing we were supposed to do great things with our lives. I don’t know why we seem to feel that way. I do know it’s not just limited to women. I’ve heard from men, too.

I don’t have the answer to this. I’m working on it. In the meantime, there is only one sign in my son’s room now. It is a quote attributed to Babe Ruth:

“Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.”

And that’s where I am now.

Batter up.