31 jan 2005
Career Girl
by Michelle Herman
My daughter has made four career
changes and is now on her fifth vocation.
She is eleven years gold. But she is a
serious-minded
girl.
The first of her vocations was farming.
She was eighteen months old when she declared
that she had figured out what she was going
to be when she grew up (actually, she insisted
she already was a farmer— on an apprentice
basis, I suppose). That lasted a year and
a half. She was a child with staying power.
Then,
at three, she turned her back on country
life: she decided on a career in paleontology.
This was no surprise, really. Dinosaurs
had been a big part of her life since before
she was a year old— before, that is, she
was a farmer—when she uttered some of
her first complex words (armored plates).
She already had an extensive collection
of
authentic-looking model dinosaurs and dinosaur
picture books and puzzles. But now she
was through playing around. She might have
been majoring in dinosaurs for the hours
she put in over the next four years poring
over reference books, or grouping and regrouping
her collection of models by era, eating
habits, size, speed, and types of armor, or writing her own speculative
accounts of dinosaur behavior, or coloration, or extinction.
When
she was six and a half, we made a trip
to Chicago, and she watched the paleontologists
at work behind plate glass in the Field
Museum. A sign posted there ("So you
want to be a paleontologist?") listed
the courses a prospective paleontologist
should take in college—mathematics,
sciences, foreign languages, art, writing—and
Grace asked
me if all of these could be taken at Ohio
State, where I've been teaching all her
life. I told her they could. "Phew," she
said, and pantomimed wiping her brow, as
if she were making a joke. But then she
turned serious. "I've
got to tell you, I'm just not crazy about
the idea of going away to college." I
laughed and put my arm around her. "Well,
it'll be a while, sweetie." "
Not that long," she said darkly.
I'd
always thought, before I had Grace, that
time seemed longer— seemed endless—to
children. But my daughter thought like
an old person.
She thought like my own grandmother, whom
she'd never known. Time flies away, my
grandmother used to say. She'd flap one
hand like a
bird flying around her as she sat at the
kitchen table. Just like that—the hand
dropped to her lap, out of sight—it goes.
I couldn't imagine what she was talking
about. Time was no thing with feathers.
Time was
a boulder to be pushed uphill. Days passed
every morning while I waited for my mother
to wake up and join me in the living room,
where I'd been watching Farmer Brown
cartoons since dawn. But Grace would have
understood my grandmother perfectly, would
have sighed and nodded and sipped her own
cup of hot water and lemon.
"Maybe for graduate school," I
said. "You
never know."
"I doubt it." She sounded grim.
That
was also the kind of kid she was. Alter
kop, as my grandmother would have said—old
head—yet at the same time showing no sign
of readiness, let alone eagerness, for
the separation from her parents that other
children her age were starting to make,
or at least to think about making. Not
even in the distant future (or what might
have seemed distant to another child) could
she imagine a life apart from us.
Midway
through second grade she decided, not without
regret, that she was more interested in
live animals than long-dead ones. She packed
up her collection of model dinosaurs, CD-ROMs
about dinosaurs, dinosaur-fact games, and
dinosaur skeleton puzzles, and shoved two
shelvesful of reference books aside to
make room for the new ones she began to
collect
in light of her new vocation: zoology.
This time she was old enough to check out
the course offerings on the OSU web site
herself, if not quite old enough to take
it in stride—she was tearful, then outraged—when
she learned that zoology was one of the
few things one could not major in at Ohio
State.
"You know, you might want to leave
home in nine or ten years," I told
her.
"Yeah, right," she said.
But
when she was ten, everything changed. She
began—overnight, it seemed—to listen to popular music; she
discovered makeup, hair products, cool
clothes. As soon as she was old enough,
she announced,
she meant to move to Hollywood: she was
going to be a pop star.
For about a year,
then, she dreamed of striding and stomping
and shimmying around a stage in belly-baring
tops and low-slung jeans and platform shoes,
belting out love (or lack-of-love, or used-to-love,
or oh-how-I-long-for-somebody-to-love)
songs. She wanted to go on tour, she said.
She wanted to have a hit record. Backup
singers. Fans.
As usual, she was overdoing it. But it
seems only fair to point out that overdoing was a tendency Grace comes by
honestly. I do everything I do—teaching, "mothering," making
friends, shopping for shoes—at double,
triple the intensity necessary; her father
works
at his painting sixteen hours a day and
hates to take a day off, and is the kind
of person who, when asked to put up a couple
of hooks in the closet, just goes ahead
and builds a whole new closet, twice the
size of the original.
When she talked about
moving to Hollywood, I couldn't keep myself
from asking—though I knew I shouldn't—"Do
you know how far away that is?" I
said it laughingly, but she was no fool. "Of
course I do," she said. "I own
a map, don't I?"
Indeed she did. A
big magnetic puzzle map of the U.S. was
one of her Chanukah gifts when she was
five. She knew exactly where every state
belonged, and how it fit into the states
around it.
I'm even pretty sure she would have been
able to tell me, if she chose to, exactly
how many miles lay between Southern California
and central Ohio. This itself served to
remind me—and I did, and do, need reminding,
regularly—of the difference between us.
For I have never been good at geography.
I can never remember where anything is
relative to anything else, or how states
are shaped;
I've never been good at using a map key
to determine distances. I don't even have
a good sense of direction. So when it comes
to figuring out where I am and where I'm going, I tend to guess, to
equivocate, or to pretend it doesn't matter. That's how I've managed
all my life.
Now, halfway through sixth
grade, she dismisses pop stardom as kid
stuff—a pipe dream. She is going to sing
(and act, and dance), she says, on Broadway. "But
first I'll go to Yale," she
tells me. "I've heard there's a very
good theater program there."
Where
had she heard such a thing? I ask her.
She shrugs.
"You've got time to think about that,
you know," I say.
And add, foolishly, "You're
eleven years old, Grace."
She rolls
her eyes.
"It's never too early to plan," she
says.
MICHELLE HERMAN and
her family live in Columbus, Ohio, where
she teaches in the
MFA program in creative writing at Ohio
State. Her most recent books—both
due out in March 2005—are The
Middle of Everything: Memoirs of Motherhood (University
of Nebraska Press) and Dog, A Short
Novel (MacAdam/Cage).
More information about both, and about
her previous books (as well as links, for
the intrepid, to ponder images of her daughter
Grace during her various careers), can
be found at http://www.michelleherman.com. |
