I DIDN’T WANT TO BE A WANT TO BE ....... I JUST DIDN’T KNOWN WHAT TO BE

Here it is, 58 years later, and I’m finally realizing I’ve wasted way too much of my life by wanting to do this, wanting to do that, never settling on just one thing.  I guess, at age 75, this is as good a time as any to stop asking myself what I want to be when I grow up. 

          I can still see myself, at age 15, sitting in the school library beginning my search into what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I was looking through women’s magazines at pictures of models and other women, trying to find an image I could identify with and one that could be a role model for me – no luck.  I couldn’t relate to any of them.  I wanted to be a writer, but that career path was strongly discouraged by the adults in my life, and that just wasn’t something being pictured in the women’s magazines at that time.

          My mother was no help.  She didn’t think I was smart enough to be a writer.  She truly believed I’d be setting myself up for heartache if I tried being a writer or pursuing any other profession. She believed that would discourage any prospective husband.  My future, according to mother if I was lucky, was to become a wife and mother.  But as unruly, and downright feisty as I was, she suggested I take typing in school as a fall back.

          With the best of intentions, she tried to prepare me for womanhood, which meant being a proper wife.  My mother was old enough to be my grandmother.  She was born in 1907 and was a product of her Victorian upbringing.  Her motherly advice to me:  

·       My duty as a woman, was to get married and have children. 

·      Men don’t like smart, competent women. 

·      Your husband always comes first no matter what. 

·      Your husband is always right no matter what. 

The saddest of all her advice –

·      If your husband strays, it’s your fault for not being a good wife. 

Daddy strayed. 

I think she gave up on me for a while when I went on a date and ended up winning every game of pool. At the time I thought she might have been right about men not liking competent women.  I never heard from that guy again.

After mother’s depressing advice, it’s no wonder that the only magazine in the library that did not appeal to me was Bride’s Magazine.  I was not like most of the girls around me who spent a lot of their time thinking and talking about getting married and living happily ever after. My secret dream was to marry an older man, endure what would hopefully be a short marriage, then start my real life after I became a widow.  (No, murder didn’t enter my mind.  I was feisty, not evil.)

Of course, I knew wanting to be a widow was not an appropriate answer to the question, what do you want to be when you grow up.  Since I chose to believe most of my teachers and other adults in my life who also told me I didn’t have what it takes to be a writer, I was still very lost. 

I had an older sister who seemed to be the perfect wife, mother and homemaker.  She even seemed happy.  I adored her and so I put all thoughts of being a writer aside and decided to be a wife and mother after all and I chose her to be my role model.  I can still almost hear Mother’s sigh of relief when I told her. 

For a while that worked for me, but then divorce happened, and being a single, working mother, I had no time or resources to even consider the possibility of becoming a writer, much less any of the other want-to-be ideas that popped into my head over the years.  All I can say is, it’s a good thing I took those typing classes.

          Now my children are grown, and I have the option of becoming what I’ve secretly wanted to be for all those years – a writer.  I have a long way to go.  I still must learn what it means to be a writer on a day-to-day basis.  I need a little encouragement and guidance to help keep me on track. I need to develop good writing techniques, and most importantly, be able to dig down deep within myself to pull out the discipline it takes to become a writer.  At least now I do know what I want to be when I grow up.

          Sometimes my mother’s voice and the voices of all those well-meaning adults rise within me, hovering over my shoulder, telling me I don’t have what it takes to be a writer.  For a moment that stops me in my tracks. I don’t know if they were wrong.  I haven’t been writing long enough to build confidence in myself as a writer.  But one thing I do know, they sure have given me a lot to write about.