W: What do you want to be when you grow up? (WR)

What do you want to be when you grow up?

When I was about 7 years old, I made a card for my mother for Mother’s Day. Unlike nowadays where teachers have their students create all of these elaborate cards or presents for their mothers, I did this on my own. It was just a folded piece of drawing paper with a drawing of a flower on which I wrote a poem:

There’ll never be another
Of my great mother
I love her night and day
And even when she’s far away.

It’s enough of an image in my brain, that I have never forgotten it. Whether it was the praise I got for the poem or just the enjoyment I got out of writing it, it set the course for what career I wanted to have. When asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” my answer at that early age was, “I want to be a writer.”

Of course, that changed over time as I grew older to “I want to be an engineer” and “I want to be a teacher”, which I eventually became, but deep down the thought of being a published writer has always been a goal of mine.

I wrote a blog post in 2007 of some of the writing I did in junior high school and high school that I shared with my teachers but never got back http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=37. That was somewhat frustrating since I would love to know what I wrote like. I assume it was better writing than my mother’s day poem.

I also wrote a number of “What would happen if” scenarios, such as if my father became president, or what would happen at a certain place where I was employed would allow me to play with their equipment (you wouldn’t want to be there.)

As I’ve written before I wrote self-reflective journals all through my 33 years of teaching. I recently found an old writer’s notebook of mine that I kept from the days before I digitized everything. Someday I will have to transcribe some of that writing and add it to my blog. Here are two pieces that I wrote in 2000 at an institute for teachers of the gifted and talented I attended (Confratute) . These might be something I would have written during Quiet Time if I had been in school (see http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=584)

A Crystal Breeze
Icicles cover the branches of trees
On a Winter’s day.
The wind rustling through the branches
Creates a sound like a crystal wind chime.

And then haiku –

Tree Cracks
A barren crevice
Magnified it shows us life
Alive before all

Now I continue writing as part of my blog. And even though I have had a few pieces of writing printed in newspaper and journals, I still dream that someday a longer piece of mine will be published in book or e-book form. I was impressed when I decided to print out all of my blog posts and put them in a binder. Since starting my blog in 2006 I’ve written over 200 pages of writing. I’ve been reading a number of old posts to connect to the writing for this A to Z Blog Challenge. I think I’ve really grown as a writer. When I can attend, I do meet with a Writer’s group once a month to write more.

Nowadays when answering the question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” I have two answers. The first is, “Older” which I would think everyone aspires to, and the second is, “I want to be a writer.” I guess some things never change.