My Future Is.. Undecided..

Day 9: How You Hope Your Future Will Be Like

I remember envisioning my future as a teenager. What girl doesn't imagine her future? It's a time when you consider college and family and moving out on your own. I always pictured a white picket fence and a big Victorian house with flower gardens and lots of pets and a happy flock of children. I thought back then that I would adopt kids or foster them. I never imagined the hard work it would take to acquire those things. I wanted beauty, color, peace, and sunshine.

I still want beauty, color, peace, and sunshine!

I never imagined the husband I would have, or what job I would do. I knew I would teach and be a mom and counsel. I didn't know in what order. Hey, I was flexible in my planning!

I still am.

I set goals short term, mostly. I haven't thought about where I see myself in 10 years, or heck even at the end of this one!

This is bad because it proves to me that I have no job prospects, no desire for a career. This stems from the past 6 years trying everything to build my reputation as a teacher. I had one awesome semester, where I proved to myself and to that elementary school that I could do it. But an opportunity exactly like that one has fizzled into non-existence. My drive to be that person has disappeared.

But not thinking ahead is also good because I can live in the moment. I also don't get worked up if a part of my Grand Plan fails.

Right now I am a writer. I've been storing up writing in notebooks and on post-its, on websites, and finishing projects during nano. My short term goals involve editing and coming up with a completed project through blood, sweat, and tears that I can fully support.

Writing is not a typical career, with salary and benefits. It is rewarding and satisfying.

So here's the dilemma I've been in for months now, job or write: how to be housemom, mother, writer, and bread earner?

Where does that leave my future? Still undecided.


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The Distant Future

Day 2: Where You'd Like to Be in 10 Years

This is hard for me.

Where I'd like to be?

Well, I could either go all outrageous or all realistic.

In 10 years, my oldest will be turning 18, we'll be planning his graduation party and his college acceptance letters will be coming in. The youngest will be 13 and a half and contemplating a future without his big brother around so much. They will probably have moved into separate bedrooms.

I hope to have most of the yard landscaped and the improvement projects done. We'll still be paying on the house.

I hope to have a book out there, maybe several.
At the very least, I hope to have a job that contributes to a retirement fund.

I hope we've been on some family vacations.

I hope to be comfortable with my weight and activity level.

I hope to be able to look back on my 30s and say I lived them as best I could. I guess that means checking a few items off my bucket list. If we get to do family vacations, that's easy enough.

Most of all, the next 10 years will be full of parenting and fighting the battles that go with child rearing; spiritual, emotional, and tactical.

Outrageously, I will have won multimillion dollars in the lottery, constructed a green-er, self-efficient mansion in the woods with a lake and a barn and a small cabin for camping like the boxcar children and have plans for a pirate-themed waterpark. After we get back from a couple years of cruises, and RV trips across the country, of course. :) I also will have planned a Ficly Convention.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.