That’s me at age eight, the year I got really serious about writing.
Once in a while people ask about childhood goals. Well, not very often. But I used to ask the kids I taught to write about their goals. When asked, here’s what I say about my childhood goals, which I remember vividly. (The vividness is partly due to the fact that I began a diary I made myself, in order to remember what it was like to be a kid, because I realized two digits were coming up soon, and it was all downhills from there.)
First I wanted to be a boy, preferably with wings. Because boys had much more fun in adventures, and when they grew up, they did not have to wear ugly red lipstick, they did not have to go to the hairdresser and come out with helmet hair that smelled like nothing on earth, they did not have to wear girdles. They did not have to wash dishes, or hang the laundry out to dry and then pull it in and iron every item, did not have to wear hair curlers to bed, did not have to cook, or clean up after everybody else besides themselves. They did not have to be told to act like a little lady when they wanted to run and play and climb trees. They were not scolded with warnings that the only future they could hope for was to “catch” a husband, and being themselves was guaranteed to drive those husbands away. Men wanted to marry little ladies.
By the time I was eight, I wanted to stay a girl because boys were idiots. They didn’t seem to realize all the freedom they had, all they wanted to do was play baseball and boring stuff. They were always spitting, which was disgusting, and they were mean. Why didn’t they want to go off and have adventures, since they were allowed to? I wanted to be an adventuring girl, with long hair and ball gowns. And since it was clear that the world was not going to cooperate, then I was going to have it by drawing out the stories in my head, and later, by writing them down. And that was that–I never wanted to be anything else, though I had brief flirtations with various things, like dancer, artist, and of course the practical things that teachers tried to shepherd us toward. It was always writer.
How about you? What did you want to be, and did you achieve it, or are you on your way? Did your goals change–or did the world change around you?
I had huge lists of things I wanted to be as a kid, usually picked out on a whim (like, at one point when I was about six, I wanted to be a dentist because I liked all the dentist’s equipment and the machine that spits out little silver eggs for fillings), but as for dreams for the future… I really wanted nothing in this world. I wanted to be somewhere else, first Oz, then Narnia, later other places, like Greensky or the water community in Lawrence Yep’s Sweetwater. Growing up was a process of realizing this world wasn’t quite as inferior to those other worlds as I had thought.
I do not recall this incident, but it has been recounted to me. When I was 11 or 12, my parents had a party. All the adults of course stayed up in the living room drinking martinis or whatever, and we kids sensibly stayed in the rec room watching TV. One of the guests came down to check on us, and did the cheek-pinching head-patting thing: “Ooh, you are so BIG! And what are you going to be when you grow up, huh?” I am told that I said, flatly, “I am going to write novels.” She was so astonished that she never forgot it, and years later told us about it.
I always wanted to be a wife and a mother. I was addicted to books, and became a writer when–as Connie Willis once said–the books became predictable and I still wanted to be surprised and astonished.
Writing allows me to surprise and astonish myself and others. It’s a way to share the joy.
When I was ten, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and so I have been, slowly over the years. I also decided I wanted to be very good at martial arts, and a couple of years ago I got my second degree black belt in aikido. I also decided, at about age twelve, that one of the coolest things in the world would be being able to do what Medieval scribes do, and now I can do that (including making the quills and ink, making paint, using gold leaf, etc.). I’ve decided I’ve become a very cool ten-year-old. I wish that helped me with the rest of my life.
I wanted to be a vetrinarian. Or a zookeeper. Or a marine biologist. I did get to work at Sea World for a summer (retail, decent gig but my coworkers sucked.) And now, I’m not a “pro” animal person, but FINALLY I get to be surrounded by animals. Only pets I had growing up were fish and a cockatiel.
When I got into music, say around 8th grade and discovered musicals, I wanted to play in a pit orchestra. I got to, for a few high school and minor gigs. Then I was into jazz and wanted to be a good musician. Then I adored my band director and decided I wanted to teach. None of that really worked out. I was a lousy teacher. Never knew what to say to the kids.
And while I wrote stories as a kid and in high school and enjoyed it, I don’t think I ever said I wanted to be a writer. Funny how things work out.
You think it’s bad being a girl who finds boys disgusting, imagine being a boy who found them disgusting. I was stuck with affiliating with them, in PE and such. Yech.
Yes, it was suggested to me that, with my distaste for boyish activity, that I might be gay. But that wouldn’t have made any sense. If I were gay, then I’d have been romantically attracted to boys. Whom I found disgusting!
I wanted to be able to learn about really cool stuff instead of the boring subjects in school.
Asakiyume: yes! I loved discovering as I got older (and could get out of L.A.’s incessant smog and heat) that the world actually does hold some amazing places.
Brenda: lol! And it came true!
Wendy: that is pretty nifty.
Karen: that is really cool!
Traci: yes, I did end up trying a lot of things, though for me the writing was always first. But I had figured out by high school that I was never going to earn a living at it.
Calimac: that is a crack-up.
Pilgrimsoul: yes, the cool stuff we weren’t being taught. Being the slow bozo on the bus, I didn’t figure that out until college.
Eeek! We’re only a few years apart in age but it sounds like we grew up on different planets! Helmet hair? Curlers? Hairdressers? I remember being instructed to “sit like a lady” when we were wearing skirts (so that no one could see your underpants), but if we were wearing trousers we could sprawl our legs any way we liked as long as there were no feet on the furniture.
I definitely wanted to be a girl because I’d noticed that we were permitted a wider range of reading material. Boys could not read “girl” books. (Their lives at school would have been hell if they had.) But girls could read both “girl” and “boy” books. In fact, they didn’t have to worry about that disctinction at all. And as a child I was all about reading as many and as wide a range of books as possible.
I didn’t have any goals when I was as young as eight. But when I was a little older I wanted to be Beverly Cleary and Louisa May Alcott when I grew up.
Catholic B: Your mom’s peers must have escaped that fifties “conformity” thing, and good riddance! Eugh, I can still remember that horrid smell of stale hair spray mixed with cigarettes that wafted after ladies, and the subdued crackle of those stringent undergarments.
Hmm. I wanted to be an opera singer. Then a nurse (I had my tonsils out, and the nurses were nice). An artist (because my father was, but my brother was far more artistically talented than I, so I dropped out of that). For a very long time, a clothing designer, designing clothes for people who didn’t have perfect bodies but wanted to look cool (where I got this notion from I cannot say, but it lasted from 7-11 years). Then a teacher or librarian, because really, no one would give you grief about reading every book that came your way. Then, when I was about 13, an actress–which carried me all the way through college until my senior year, when I reluctantly decided that I was neither cute enough, talented enough, or tough enough for that lifestyle.
Oddly enough, the thing I never meant to be was a writer. I wrote, but for various reasons didn’t intend it to be my work.
Madeleine: you were clearly doing research for writing by trying all those nifty things!
I wanted to be alive to experience all of life and get out of the boring narrow-minded little town I was born in.
In an application for Pratt Institute some years later, I included in my portfolio a nude photo of myself with the rude bits covered by a sign that read, ‘I am a work of art.’
Probably the reason I am not as successful a writer as I think I want to be, is that the adventure of living keeps getting in the way
Martha: that sounds like a wonderful application, and your reason for not writing makes plenty of sense.
I had kind of routine desires to be a teacher and then a nurse (my grandmother was a nurse), but eventually realized that I seriously did not like most people, so it seemed unkind to inflict myself upon them. I decided to be a poet when I was about nine.
Mostly I had anti-goals, though. I still have the list somewhere; I made it when I turned twelve, which I felt was a portentous age, after which I would probably lose my intellectual ability. I swore that I would never get married, wear high heels, wear makeup, memorize my social security number, or get a driver’s license. I yearned to be a tomboy, a recognized character type in the books I read, but was handicapped by being terrible at sports and uninterested in standard “boy” things. I decided, I forget when, that I wasn’t really a girl, I was an intellectual. I was a pretty funny kid, I guess, but really, given the conditions you describe in your post, which I recall with horror, it’s not too surprising.
P.
Pamela: I suspect that many of us had various types of gender identification issues judging by some of the rigid programming we were getting, pushing us toward conformity to a specific standard of ‘lady’. It was especially vexing when one began to realize that the constant promise that ladies would be protected by their innocence–that is, if you behaved like a lady, the world would treat you as one–was so much hot air.
I wanted to be a wizard. It didn’t work out.
That is so profoundly a generational thing, Sherwood. I think the divide must fall between you and me, even though we are not that far apart in age. I do not remember any particular ‘lady’ option in life. And I know that my daughter has been brought up to remake the world, better, faster, stronger.
Brenda: it could also be a function of area.
Elizabeth: hey, there’s still time . . .
I was lucky in that I was growing up in Greenwich Village and my parents were on the non-conformist side, so my available role models were, um, eccentric. Thank God.
Even so, my mother carried many of the “lady” prejudices with her. Ladies did not have feet as big as mine. They did not ask for things, they waited to have them offered. And then they only took a little bit. They did not change tires or pump gas, and while they didn’t have to like doing householdy things, they were unlikely to want to do anything more aggressive.
Madeleine: She was probably raised with those.
Thinking back, it’s interesting to remember the different signs of a lady as demonstrated by one of my relatives who was born on a farm, and put to work at age twelve, so there was never any “lady” in her upbringing. But wow did she accumulate it as she found it. Things like “This is she!” when someone called, and wearing gloves and a hat if you go on an airplane. And she was dead serious about this advice, when I began driving, “Make sure you have clean and hole free underwear when you get into a car. You don’t want to have a crash and them ambulance drivers think you’re not brought up right.”
Well, when I was four I told everyone around me that I wanted to be a mommy. Soon after, I decided I wanted to write stories. I had some brief flirtations with the idea of becoming an architect, or economist, or working for the UN (because my mom said something to the effect of writing novels being something you can do to the side–ie: it’s not a real job), but I went back to my original inclinations after all.
And I’m very happy for it.
My daughter has seen enough of the opulent and munificent writer’s life to immediately select World Conquest as her day job.
I wanted to be a mermaid fairy princess. (Said in that exact order.)
I’ve got the mermaid part down pat, I’m working on the fairy bit, and I think I’ll leave the princess up to Lady Luck.
Once I realized I wouldn’t grow a tail when I got older, I wanted to be a dancer. I wasn’t aggressive enough in asking for dance lessons, though, so by the time I actually got classes it had been bumped off the list of professions. I had found writing by that time, anyway, which had replaced dancing as my long-term goal. Looking back, though, dancing and stories (I played a lot of make believe games) took equal time in my free-time passions.
Danceswithwaves: wow, that could be me. (I got the dance itch out by taking it through school, dancing in productions, and choreographing same.)
Rabia: LOL!
Brenda: Hey, that makes sense to me! (My daughter also saw the total lack of dazzle in a novelist’s life, which is probably why she went into the film industry.)
Hopefully her career choice will pay off for us; I have warned my daughter that one of the things that the World Dictator has to do is mandate a standardized e-book platform.
I was in an American Girls Historian Club — my dance class mates who were also homeschoolers and I. We decided for one of our projects to invent a character in a time period not yet covered (only 5 dolls then) and created “Faith”, a pilgrim.
Being a reliable sort even at 11, I was the only one to actually write the Meet Faith novel we were supposed to.
I got bored before I finished it and went off to write a story about a princess who invents guerrilla ninja warfare in her Saharan oasis country to save her people from the Jafar-like vizier.
I had stumbled across the fact that I could come up with books with everything *I* wanted in them, instead of just telling them to myself in my head until I fell asleep.
And when people asked me if I wanted to be a writer when I grew up this seemed perfectly reasonable and low-stress for requirements.
So I said yes. Who really thinks they’ll grow up to be a horse-trainer anyhow? ^_^
Bethany: you sound like a natural born writer, ohhhh yes!
At age 8 I heard a string quartet play for our school to encourage kids to take up an instrument and I knew with an electrifying ephiphany that I was born to play the violin.
My father disagreed. I ended up with a degree in music anyway. But I still don’t know how to play the violin.
Lucy: Hey, there’s no time like the present!
I got a recorder for my 59th birthday, and I am trying to teach myself to play.
When I was in fourth grade, we were asked to write a short essay about why being grown up would be a great thing. Everybody else wrote about jobs and houses and kids and marriages, but I wrote “Being grown up will be fabulous, because then I can stay up as long as I like and watch all the TV I want.” Well, I got to have that.
As a kid, I wanted to either make animated cartoons or work at the funfair (I loved both cartoons and funfairs). The funfair thing fell by the wayside, though I still get a thrill meeting engineers who used to design fairground rides. I held on to the animated cartoon thing, until it became painfully clear that I couldn’t draw well enough. After I discovered opera, I wanted to become an opera composer for a while. I even wrote two and a half acts of my own opera, though I clearly cared more about the libretto than the music. Eventually I decided I wanted be a film director, a desire which stuck with me until the end of school. This was complicated by the fact that there was no film industry to speak of where I lived. I even considered applying to film school, but at the time there were only two film schools in Germany, in Munich and Potsdam, i.e. far away in cities where I did not want to be. I did end up joining a community video group, but dropped out again when I did not get along with the other members. I still get a big thrill meeting people who are in the film industry, though.
In the end, what really fascinated me about all of those things was telling stories. The visual component just came in because I wanted everything to look right and film seemed like the best option.
I remember — with the help of my mother’s stories — crying before school one morning when I was in kindergarten or first grade, because I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be a singer or a music teacher when I grew up. (She told me I didn’t have to know right away — apparently I’d taken the “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question as an urgent one. I, of course, changed my mind many, many times after that.)
Between third and fourth grade, I wanted to be able to tesser. I haven’t achieved that one yet, but it hasn’t lost its appeal.