When I Grow Up

My four year old son told me that he wanted to be a chef — one that, of course, races monster trucks.  I believe he feels his superhero vigilantism is just going to be a sideline hobby.

He then asked me, "Do you want to be a princess when you grow up?"

I am already charmed that he still believes I haven't grown up, that I still have options.  I also love that he believes "princess" is one of the choices open to me, much like "rock star" or "ballerina."

What did I want to be before, though?

Childhood.

At one point, I wanted to be an Olympic ice skater.  That is, until I came to the crushing realization that I have absolutely no sense of balance. No triple axles in my future. And that was before I heard about the "get up at five o'clock in the morning to practice" nonsense.

Then, in high school, I was absolutely convinced I was going to be a (don't laugh)… geneticist.

I have no idea where that wild hair came from.  I know I was watching a film about Mendel and the damned pea project, and I thought "wow, recessive genes, that's AWESOME."  Maybe it was a control freak thing.  Whatever.  That dream went the way of the dodo when I realized that while the heart was willing, the attention span was weak.  Especially when it came to biochem.

When I signed up for college, I was a double major.  I wanted to simply be an art major, because by senior year I was convinced I'd discovered my true calling:  being an animator.  I'd been in love with Disney movies and other cartoons all my life. (Still am.)  That was what I wanted to do.

Of course, my parents said: "Art school?  No way are we paying for you to learn how to starve!"  (This was before Pixar.  Oh, if only they knew, huh?)  So I made it a double major with Mass Communications, so I could learn advertising.  That seemed "solid."  They went along with it.

Practice of Art became Art History when I learned that nobody at Berkeley seemed to believe animation was an art.  D'oh.

Adulthood.

When I graduated, I discovered that a degree from Berkeley did nothing for my career in any field.  My blazing typing speed, on the other hand, was a valuable commodity.

I became an ad slave.  An ad sales slave. An office manager.  A product manager.  A legal assistant.  An executive assistant.  A financial analyst.

And during all that time, I plunked away at writing.  Scraps of seven-chapter false starts.  Pages of plot outlines.  Character sketches.

Not because I thought I was going to be a writer.  No, real people weren't writers.  Nobody I knew made a living as a writer.  I wrote because if I didn't, I'd go nuts.

I didn't dream of growing up to be a writer, because it's just there, like brown eyes and being right handed.  Nobody I knew got paid to be right handed.

My "thing" became my job, which became my dream.

It isn't easy being a self-employed writer.  There are lean months when the royalty check is a long way away in either direction, and "pasta again?" becomes a plaintive cry.  When there's more debit than credit.  There are definitely days when I miss the steady pace of a bi-weekly paycheck.

But I have been lucky enough to do what I love.  To essentially be what I am.

My son knows I'm a writer.  Sometimes when we play, he likes writing stories with me on a huge piece of paper, which he then illustrates.

He knows that he's already a writer, too.

And he didn't even need to wait until he grew up to do it.