when i was a kid, i didn’t think much about what i wanted to be when i grew up. perhaps that’s the reason i didn’t go anywhere i wasn’t shoved when i was in college? in any case, when asked the generic school-age question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” i always came up with generic answer to fit [what i felt was] the idiocy of the question. after all, i was a kid… why on earth would i want to think about growing up??? i couldn’t actually be an astronaut, doctor, or teacher right then, so why bother thinking about it? those were the types of answers i always gave. even when i hit college, people said “you’re good at playing the saxophone, you should major in music”. so i did. of course, i had no idea what i wanted to do with a degree in music… i just knew that in highschool music was my life, so why change that? i didn’t know any better. by the time i figured out i was supposed to be majoring in English Lit, i was already pregnant and any solitary turn my life may have taken was washed away in waves of contractions and the safe birth of my son.
the most realistic scenario i ever imagined for myself had two different sides to the story. in the first tale, my best friend and i used to imagine moving to New York and living out our days as crazy cat ladies. yes, i once had dreams no more noble than to get an apartment in a big city, have a ton of cats, and do nothing but work and read. even as a kid i was a pessimist.
my second dream was the total opposite… when not in the mood to declare myself single forever, i’d say “i just want to get married, and be a wife and mom with 11 kids.” yes, even as a 16 year old girl i dreamed part time of having 11 children. i’d still like at least 4 kids… but alas, life doesn’t always work out the way one imagine’s it will. i certainly didn’t plan on falling in love with a man who just wanted 1 kid, and not until around 35 years old at that!
i don’t mind the way my life has turned out. i love my husband dearly. he is a good man, who works his ass off so i can take care of our kids at home. i may not have 11 kids (or even the meager 4) but i do have 2 beautiful children. i could have handled having 11 kids like K… but 1 E is enough to drive me to near insanity with the sheer force of her dominating, willful personality. sometimes i think that my husband and i were meant to be together so we could temper each other’s dreams. after all, having 11 kids would have been really, really stupid of me. i’d also like to think that if he lived out his dream of becoming a lone geologist in Antarctica, that wouldn’t have been the best of choices either. (that was a career choice of his he shared with me when we first me. i doubt he even remembers it now…)
i’d like to think that if, while i was a child, i watched a highlights reel of my life right now, i would say “that’s what i want to be when i grow up”.
what about you? what did you want to be vs what you are? are you still striving for your goal?