What Will She Be When She Grows Up?

As my recently college-graduated daughter waits tables in a chic restaurant in Harvard Square, I find myself wondering what she will eventually do in life. My only hope is that she will be reasonably happy and have enough money to enjoy life.

From the time she could hold a pencil, my daughter was always sketching. Her early animals looked real. Her people were happy, sad, or conveyed whatever emotion she gave them. At four she sat down and played the piano without lessons, picking out all the songs that she had in her head. She did a summer at RISD. She thrived on the arts.

But when it came time to declare a major in college, she decided that she did not want to chance being a starving artist and chose to study biology and psychology. In her internships to try to find the practical application of what she learned, she has so far rejected the laboratory rats and the troubled girl group home. The prospects for someone with an undergraduate bio-psych degree are not bright – that is, not if you want to be more than a starving biopsych person. Type A student that she is, she needs a break from school and simply doesn’t have the passion for these fields to launch into a graduate program in either biology or psychology right now.

So she is making a lot of quick, but hard-earned money serving the Harvard grad students trendy food in downtown Boston. Meanwhile, I am sure she is working on a game plan for the next chapter of her life. I will probably know what it is when she needs a little help to launch it.

For now, I can only wonder where this talented young woman is going to take her life, or where her life is going to take her. I hope it will be an interesting journey, one with few regrets, one that allows her to feel good about herself and her lifework.