“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Might be the question children get asked the most. No one has asked me that question in… a long time. Somewhere between when I was the age my daughter is now and the age I was when she was born, someone asked me for the last time, then never again. The questions that replaced it — “what do you do for a living?” or “where do you work?” — are so concrete and so specific, they don’t require any imagination to answer. It seems like growing up is supposed to involve abandoning childish stuff like dreams and wild fantasies to focus on proper adult stuff like health insurance copays and 401K match vesting schedules.
Yet, here I am, forty years old, asking myself what do I want to be when I grow up? Aren’t I supposed to have this figured out by now? Even being a Grown Up felt unattainable for most of my adulthood. But that’s normal, right? Everyone is just as lost in life, pretending to be a real adult to get by. Fake it till you make it. It wasn’t until pretty recently that I started experiencing a few moments where it didn’t feel like I was pretending. There’s been nothing in my life more powerful than being my child’s whole world to make me put my big girl pants on and woman up.
I have indeed grown up and, in the process, become many of the things I wanted to be and some things that I could’ve never dreamed of. But still, I don’t feel like I’m done becoming whatever it is that I’m going to have been. I’m on an ongoing journey, and I want to share it to connect with other voyagers, maybe learn from each other along the way. I don’t know where it will end up. Here’s what I do know: I am a mom, a geek, an immigrant. I am stubborn, curious, passionate. Most of all, I am a work in progress. Perhaps that just makes me human after all.