If you were to look at choices as if they were a linear display--the timeline would look like a reverse fractal. The huge selection of choices available to most of us would keep being halved by each big choice we made.
The child that is told his/her whole childhood that "you can be anything you want", knows soon enough that isn't actually true. By seven, I knew I could never be the King of Siam---for so sooooo many reasons.
We want our children to feel confident, to feel capable, to aim for the stars and never doubt themselves. But by puberty most of us have figured out, due to where we are, who our parents are, and our own physical/mental proclivities, that there are things we can never be. Our parents do not always recognize those limitations though I suspect that their failure to be realistic is a part of their own grieving for their own lost choices.
At 16, after 10 years of dance lessons that my mother scrimped to pay for, I told her I was done. She was angry, disappointed, and horrified that she had wasted all that time and money on those lessons. She reminded me repeatedly of how much she had wanted that opportunity and how ungrateful I was.
I had never asked for dance lessons but liked them well enough. Except for the recitals, the family reunion performances, the school talent shows--i.e., dancing was fun, but not my dream. Add puberty, to a person that was short but built like a fireplug not a fairy. I was not a fat kid, but desperately needed a bra by 11 and had hips, not fat, but wide hips and my leg muscles were hard as a rock but not lithe---i looked more like a weight lifter than a ballerina. Simone Biles is well muscled, but this was the early 70's. In the early seventies, the world still thought Barbie was anatomically correct. Twiggy was NOT gone, just reinvented as an anorexic giantess.
A choice from my "be anything" had ended.
Other choices ended earlier: I had heard that a girl that looked like her father was lucky. I suspect that was to appease the little girls that would never win beauty contests but at least I did not have a full mustache like dad. By 9, I had accepted that Miss America was off the table, just as I knew I would never be a cowboy in the old west, royalty with my own country, or the first woman to fly across the ocean alone (already done).
By puberty, I knew that running was not on the list---apparently huge breasts are genetic---hand model was out, I had the hands of a 10 year old boy, and they were usually just as dirty because I had to be doing stuff and stuff did not include manicuring my nails while avoiding dirt, paint, auto grease, or rockhunting.
Those were choices.
By high school, standardized tests had convinced my school that I was no dummy and they encouraged college. As in, "you should go to college, not secretarial school. Do you want to be a teacher or a nurse". An older friend was going to be a nurse, so I chose that. (knew in the 3rd year of school--first year of actual nursing classes that I was not loving what I chose. I would have been better served by a art major with history minor, or archeology---nursing school was hard, exacting, made to be both hard and exacting, but not because I would use most of the information in my work. Physicians would not allow that. I look back and realize that the nursing instructors were nurses that wanted the profession to be accepted as more than just a just assistants to physicians. They have made some headway in the last 50 years. But I should never have made that choice.
Other decisions, to marry or not, to have kids or not, to move to another state or not---that last one still a possibility, but how many mothers choose to move away from their grown children and grandchildren.
By retirement, many choices have disappeared---but not all, definitely not all. Do I continue to smoke? do I exercise or sit down in a recliner. Do I eat healthy or gourmand out. Do I travel? Do I start a new hobby? Do I end an old hobby?
Periodically, I miss dance class. I sometimes pull out the music books and play piano--badly, flood humidity then a move to a new home is hard on the tune-up so no matter how well or badly I play, it's off-key. Do I paint? Do I write? Do I polish rocks, make jewelry, make furniture, build a greenhouse and garden.
Choices I still have.
I'm still a little upset about losing the choice of being a cowboy in the old west.
No comments:
Post a Comment