“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Remember when adults asked this question? What did you say? If you were a little girl, was it something normal and expected or did the adult asking stare at you dumbfounded and wonder what in the hell was wrong with you.

Usually I got that dumbfounded look. Eventually my parents’ friends stopped asking, afraid I think either I would continue to give them answers they didn’t understand or they were embarrassed by. Too often, my answers also humiliated my mother; I paid for these later when there was no one was around to stop her.

Some of my more interesting answers, all given prior to my tenth birthday:

Gypsy Rose Lee in her heyday

• I want to be a gypsy, live in a wagon and travel the world.
• I want to be Gypsy Rose Lee; I had seen a poster of her in a friend’s basement and thought she was fabulous.
• I want to be a courtesan. I didn’t really understand this one but we had recently toured some castle in either France or England, it had been built for a Kings favorite. This seemed like a good occupation.
• I want to be an artist.
• I want to write books.
• I want to dance.

Some fine adult shocked by my list of what I wanted to be finally asked the question, “Don’t you want to get married?” Of course, others would ask in dismay, “Don’t you want to have babies?”

As a side note, I never played with baby dolls and tended to abuse Barbie’s. I simply wasn’t very girlie.

“No,” I said wisely with a shake of my head, “married isn’t for me”. Oddly, I would marry three times before I was forty, none of them took. Perhaps I was correct at the time, marriage truly wasn’t for me at a young age.

“Don’t you want to be a nurse or maybe a fairy princess?”

“Silly there isn’t any such thing as fairies,” I sagely counseled the adults who asked, “and I don’t like sick people,” I shamelessly added.

I was not a normal little girl at all, introverted and with a rich inner life, I had little desire for friends and found most the adults around me slightly silly. My dreams tended to be fed by the books I read or the landscapes I was exposed too. The two and half years we spent in Europe provided fodder for an imagination that built worlds peopled by those who loved me and led me on adventures too feed a starved soul.

Then I grew up, harshly and with little transition time between childhood and adulthood. No time to feel my way gently through those awkward stages of pre-teen when we discover who we might become or might wish to be, instead I was just forced through to the other side. My heart faltered, froze to be honest. My imagination took to darker roads.

Huntress, DC Comics

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

• I want to dance.
• I want to write books.
• I want to be an artist.
• I want to be a stewardess, I want to see the world and never stop traveling.
• I want to be a masked avenger and kill those who hurt others, especially children and girls.

All these were told to those fine adults when they asked me between the ages of 11 and 12. Just one year, during that year of course something terrible had happened to me. Because of the last answer, a school counselor suggested to my parents I had a ‘slight’ problem and perhaps they should get me some help.

I attempted to burn down the playhouse at the child physiologists’ office when he asked me to demonstrate how I felt about my home life. I rescued my brother and the dogs first. He concluded I had deep seated problems, he didn’t ask why I did that. I concluded he was an idiot and refused to return.

I learned one thing after this adventure. Keep my less socially acceptable thoughts to myself; they could get me in trouble.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Wendy Davis

• I want to dance.
• I want to write.
• I want to be an artist.
• I want to travel and take pictures to show the world as it is.
• I want to be an attorney and argue before the Supreme Court.
• I want to be a politician and change the world.
• I want to change the world.

The last time someone asked me, what I wanted to be when I grew up I was nearly 15. It was just before I ran away for the last time. It was just before my world would change and my life would change forever. What I wanted to be? I wanted to be all of those things, not just some of those things. Even then, even at that age, I was locked into the world around me and I knew there was something desperately wrong, horribly incompatible with equity and fairness.

I wanted to change the world.

Now, forty-one years later I think the world is more wrong, the world needs more positive change. I ask myself, “What do you want to do before you are too old to do it?”

I find though, I am afraid. I am scared to death of lunatics with guns. I am scared beyond reason of just how much my life, my world, my history could be exposed and thus those I love could be harmed if I stepped outside of this small arena, the world of blogging. I am afraid I have lived a life full of potholes, mistakes and terrible pain and even those things over which I had no control over could be used to do great harm to those I care deeply for, could be used to destroy futures. So now, when the world most needs masked avengers, activists willing to use their powers for good I am brought to my knees in fear and I am both afraid and ashamed of my fear.

What did you want to be when you grew up? Are you doing it?