What are you going to be when you grow up?
Not so long ago, a new problem came in eyesight between my children: what will happen to them in the future? From what will they live when they can’t spend our money anymore asking for the newest LEGO wonders, when they’ll even have to pay for the ice cream on their own (scary future, that’s for sure!). The ideas were popping in their heads, they changed their plans nearly every five seconds: hunter, sailor, craneman, doctor, teacher, motorman…
Fourth was the most persevering: he wanted to be a motor racer, whatever happens.
I’ll buy a motor, like what father has and we will ride them together when I will be as old as he is now. – he said.
“But father will be very old by then, he might not even live then…”- told him the others.
“You’re all stupid! If he didn’t live then how could we ride our motorbikes together?” – answered Fourth resentfully.
MiddleOne decided to become a heavy equipment operator. He wants to drive tractors, cranes, dredgers. We told him that for that he will sure need to study a lot. Hearing that he became a bit uncertain and asked: if he wanted to drive a smaller dredger than he would have to study less? Nice prospect! He’s only a second grader, but he already tries to haggle with me over the amount of studying. What’s gonna be here later? Well, I have experience concerning this, but I hoped he would be different, than the others… Am I naive? Yes. But that’s what keeps me alive.
BigBoy wants to sail around the globe, he is already planning his boat: every day a new and different plan of a sailboat falls out of his textbooks from his schoolbag. The black and white drawings and calculations done on little pieces of paper and books connecting to sailing from Husbands old library cover his whole room.
Of course this is only his newest mania – thanks to the Hungarian sailor, Nándor Fa and the Vendée Globe sailing race, about which they always have been up to date as they followed it on the internet -, he wanted to be a hunter earlier, but only of that kind who has at least half a dozen rifles and lives alone in the woods, because then no one can bother him while reading with such unimportant things, like asking him to at least throw his dirty clothes in front of his room door, otherwise he’ll have to go the school either naked or in smelly clothes; or telling him to bring the trash to the container once in a thousand years. Outrageous, what kind of needs we have!
BigGirl does not yet have a certain idea, but now she mostly opts for the actress-singer pairing, or at least the fact that she spends long minutes every night “jumping around” in front of the mirror, not taking her eyes off of her own self, while concentrating on the (for me, seemingly a bit chaotic) moves. Her becoming an actress is in my opinion a bit of an exaggeration, since she handles telling poems a bit too freely. Although she never stops while telling a poem, I don’t really think that our big poets would be happy about some of her corrections in their works… Just like the literature teacher who doesn’t really appreciate it either, though I really appreciate that she exceeds concerning synonyms, there are very few dilogies in her sentences… she already performs better than some people living from writing.
LittleOne, though he’s quite far from career choices and of course couldn’t even understand the question itself, indicated with his behaviour, by arranging my pans and soulfully stirring the salt-sugar-water mix in my biggest pot on the stove during the whole conversation, that, in my opinion, he’s gonna be a chef.
Now I’ll only have to teach him that we don’t open eggs by throwing them on the ground with a malicious smile on our faces, while watching mom’s reaction and that beans were not made to be put in our noses and then try to shoot it out with a big blow.
If we can get rid of these wildings, then maybe even the Michelin-star is in accessible distance… a hand-drawn version surely is… we will see with the real one.
The children were of course interested how we had imagined our futures when we were children. Husband, as a good boy, wanted to be a locomotive engineer of course.
“And you, Mom, what did you want to be?” – sounded the question.
“Geologist on an oil rig” – I said.
“What on a what?” – asked Fourth, at what the big ones started to laugh, like horses.
“You didn’t always want to be our Mother?” – he asked a bit sadly hearing the answer.
I did. If I think about it a little harder, I always wanted to be their mother, just that simply.
