Smorgasbord

I am looking for work, and I feel like I am a starving person at an all-you-can-eat buffet. I'm having trouble narrowing down the options, of limiting myself to any particular area. I took those personality and career tests, was disappointed to learn that I've been successfully pigeon-holed as a caregiver/educator/soother-type, and since then have been wandering into the dangerous territories of veterinary assistant and EMT.

I can't help feeling like I didn't "do it right" way back when, just out of college. I took pretty safe paths--nothing too risky. (Well, it felt risky moving from the East Coast to Birmingham, Alabama, where I didn't know a soul--had never even been, except for my first interview. But it wasn't really occupationally risky.) I never really branched out. My dad was an English teacher, I majored in English, didn't know what to do when it was time to make weekly visits to my college's career center, so registered with a couple of teacher-placement agencies. Felt relief when I was offered a job (actually, two jobs--I had to make a choice).

Meanwhile, one of my closest friends went to law school and is now a partner in an immigration law firm in California. Another close friend got her PhD in marine biology and after doing most of her research on Catalina Island, is now a full professor at the University of Florida. My high school boyfriend who was always more passionate about his guitar than he ever was about me now spends his life writing and playing music and making a living at it. One of my brief high school flings is head of anesthesiology at the University of Chicago hospitals. My best friend in junior high is a respected, successful Hollywood writer and director (ever seen Family Stone?...)

So I'm left wondering if my dreams passed me by--or, more likely and more to the point, did I pass them by? I've mellowed somewhat. I recognize what motherhood and having a happy family mean to me, and I would absolutely choose them over winning the Nobel Prize in literature or being the recipient of an Oscar for screenwriting or inventing a vaccine for AIDS. If what matters to me is shaping the future, having an impact on the world after I'm gone, I know that's precisely what I'm doing by being the best mother I know how to be.

And while I'm doing that, I will continue to keep my options open, I won't try to limit myself to teaching or social working or caregiving. But I will also try to be realistic. I will try not to over-romanticize things like helping defenseless animals or rushing to the scene of an accident in the back of a speeding ambulance. And there may even be days when I allow myself to live in the here and now and not place myself in some future. I'll work on that tomorrow.