One day last week as I was driving my niece to school we struck up a conversation regarding her post high school graduation plans. I ran down the usual questions, what dorm would she be staying in, when does school start and what classes would she be taking.
She answered each and then she mentioned the nursing program and I tripped and stumbled a loooooooooong way, 15 years to be exact down memory lane.
I thought about myself when I was preparing to graduate and getting ready for college.When asked, I would mechanically ramble off that I wanted to be a stock broker who worked on Wall Street.
Riiiiiiiiiiight.
I knew when I was saying it, I really wanted to go to the Fashion Institute in New York. I wanted to be a buyer for a major department store. I wanted to live fashion and the glitz and glamour that came along with it. Thing is my parents weren’t hearing it. Neither of my parents attended college but I knew they had high expectations of what I would become. I could hear the pride in my mother’s voice as she bragged on my career aspirations to her friends and colleagues.
So I went to college and majored in business…See my MAC lipglass poppin’ I was more concerned with that..
Thing is I think if she was paying more attention to the type of person I was in relation to who she wanted me to be she would’ve seen that I was so different from what I was speaking. The mall was my second home. My room housed stacks and stacks of fashion magazines and I was constantly yelled at for plastering pages of dresses and models on my wall, but she never nurtured that part of me. She just wanted to me to get a stable job and make lots of money….but what parent doesn’t want that for their child?
I don’t…in theory. I want my children to be happy, and not a slave to material gain. Yet I want them to be comfortable..parenting is hard work. We all know now that happiness in a small shack far outweighs the burden of doing something daily that we despise. I would do my children an injustice to instill anything but my desire for them to do what they love.
I’m not mad at her but it just sparks something in me to make sure that I am supporting my children in what they are interested in and not what I want them to do….except for play the piano and ballet.
As much as I wanted to, I didn’t take my niece on that interview because she isn’t my child. But I couldn’t help but wonder if she really wants to be a nurse. I see a creative soul in her, but I guess she’ll have to figure that out on her own…like the rest of us who figured it out late in life or a huge shout out to those of us who are still searching…cause I haven’t quite figured it out nearly $75K later
Did you really know what you wanted to be when you graduated from high school?
Will you force your children to go to college or will you encourage them to seek out and make their own way in the world with your emotional AND——> monetary<——- support?
