Work {31 Days of Five-Minute Free Writes}

I love to learn of people’s childhood aspirations, what they wanted to be when they grew up. Always, always I wanted to be a mom. But there were other pursuits that appealed to me, too.

I wanted to write from the moment I first held a crayon in my chubby little hand. I penned boxes and boxes of homemade books, written and illustrated at four and six and eight and on and on. The illustration tapered off in middle school. But the writing continued, now on journal pages and floppy disks and flash drives stashed away.

Not to the exclusion of writing, I also wanted to be a storm chaser. I distinctly recall standing just inside the glass back door of my childhood home, watching my dad walk around the backyard during a lightning storm. He was completely unafraid, and I remember deciding at that moment that I wasn’t scared of weather either. To this day, in thunderstorms, you’ll find me on the front porch watching the action.

There was a brief astronaut phase, thanks to watching “Space Camp” with my cousin. The desire faded when I realized how much math would be involved in the college education of an astronaut. I still love to gaze upwards on a starry night, though, or to lie in the grass in the wee morning hours for a meteor shower.

When you were a child, what did you want your grownup work to be?

This post is part of 31 Days of Five-Minute Free Writes, an exercise in writing a timed, prompted post every day during the month of October. For me, it's a challenge to move beyond prideful perfectionism, to write more freely, and to share more openly.