When I Grow Up

When you are little you are often asked what you want to be when you grow up. When I was very little it was pretty clear that I had two career aspirations. I wanted to be a teacher and I wanted to be a writer. My mother can attest to me drawing up attendance logs for students that did not really exist, the mourning that followed the last day of school and our yearly trips to the school supply store for workbooks to keep me and "my students" busy over summer break. Meanwhile, I also wrote, illustrated and published my own series of books whose main character was named "Pretty Peggy". In fact, I still have these early works and I occasionally look through them and laugh at their crude drawings and storylines.

While the dream of being a teacher waned later in life, my aspirations of writing continued and in high school I decided that writing novels was very daunting and not something many people actually get to make a living off of, so I joined the school newspaper and took a spin as a journalist. While I made some great friends and even won an award for my editorial on why the bushes at our high school stunk to high heaven (I kid you not), I eventually decided that although I enjoyed the writing part and even liked the research part, I hated the competitiveness of being the first to "break" a story and so along with my career as a teacher, this too fell to the wayside.

The years that followed were tumultuous to say the least. During my sophomore and junior years you never would have recognized the girl that could not sleep from the excitement of the first day of school and who asked for extra assignments to play teacher during breaks. I won't get into details. Enough said about that. Consequently however, I spent my senior year just trying to do what was necessary to graduate. It was then that I realized that our guidance counselors were there for two groups of people: The ones that were college bound and the ones that were in serious trouble with the law. They never saw my potential and tried to inspire me to strive for more. They had written me off. While this did not hit me like an epiphany, it never left my mind.

In college, I decided to study psychology. It appealed to my need to organize and label everything and allowed me to explore myself. As I got further into the field, I realized how scientific it was and while it still interested me, I was not really thinking about how I was actually going to use this knowledge in a career path. I just really wanted to get my degree - a personal goal, which I am very proud to say I achieved.

And this brings us full circle - what do I want to be when I grow up now that I am grown up? Well first of all I would not trade where I am now as a full time stay at home mom to my kiddos for the world. But within the next few years, they will both be in school themselves and I would love nothing more than to get my Master's degree and work as a school counselor. I want to help those students that are college bound. I want to help those students who are in trouble with the law. I REALLY want to help all those students who fit somewhere in between and help them find there path and inspire them to do all they can with what they have. Put another way, I want to help others figure out what they want to do when THEY grow up and then help them find a way to make it happen. And maybe in my spare time, I will finally write that novel and who knows? Pretty Peggy could become the next Harry Potter. Look out JK Rowling, here I come!