My little girl

Children grow up way too fast.  This is a proven fact and no one who has them would try to argue.  One minute they are crying to be fed and the next we're crying because they're leaving.

My daughter did that to me - grew up and away far faster than the speed of sound.  Yesterday she was refusing to eat any Flintstone vitamin other than Wilmas and today she is an accomplished writer and editor for a major magazine. 

What happened to the tow-head who replied "nine" every time she heard Peter Piper?  Only she could be that emphatic and positive.  She, who stole my heart the second she was born has spent close to thirty years being the most direct, definite, intense child I have. 

When she was three she told me that it was time we started looking for her castle. 

She always read and absorbed everything going on around her - that's what makes her good at her job.  And she is.  The best.  Her managing editor, a hard-boiled New Yorker, tells her that often.  She won every award in her journalism class and underclassmen, I'm told, still speak of her with awe.  She is special.

She's at a turning point in her career.  They closed her bureau in November so she has been free-lancing since.  Print journalism, folks, really is going the way of the dinosaur.  But she makes enough to support herself and she's getting to write about things that she enjoys. 

Essentials like insurance packages and retirement plans are not part of her life anymore, and she's beginning to think about things like this.  Free-lancing is great and pays the bills, but she's looking ahead and realizes that she won't always be twenty-eight and needs a plan.

She has two interviews next week.  Managing editor of a very large health magazine, with accompanying perks, and as a reporter for the largest newsgroup in the US.  She would be terrific at both.

The realist in me wants to encourage her to take the managing editor position.  It's safe, been around for years, and she would bring youth and enthusiasm to a lucrative subscription group - Baby Boomers.

The dreamer in me wants her to grab her trench coat and laptop and take the reporting job.  She would travel and be engaged in reality like she would otherwise not know first-hand.  She's single and doesn't even have a goldfish - there's nothing to tie her down.

She won't ask for advice; she gave that up in 1985.  But she will want to hear me pro and con both should they be offered.  I don't know what I'll say.

One of my girlhood dreams was to be Margaret Mead.  Travel in hot climates studying people and writing about an existence so far removed from my own that I really couldn't even imagine it.

Instead, I met someone when I was way too young and married him.  He was way too young too, and the fact that he looked like Richard Gere and drove a GTO couldn't make two totally different people learn how to be a couple.  We divorced, I met my second husband and when we married two years later I started living the life so many others have.

What kind of anthropologist would I have been?  I can't say that what I have done instead is somehow less important.  My life has merit and my children are people I like as well as love.  My career has fulfilled me, usually.  I have great friends.  I have no trouble living with the me I became.

But I will always wonder.