All was well until I got to college and took the basic “Form and Theory of Fiction” course.
The instructor was an ass who hated all genre fiction, but didn’t bother telling us that before reaming us mercilessly. (Can you ream someone WITH mercy? Dur.)
It took a couple years before I could write again. I team-wrote a story with a friend of mine and we published on a Usenet group. (Yes, I’m old. We got great reviews.
Then I didn’t know what to do after college, and lost a bit of my inspiration.
I got my inspiration back, only to lose it again. Being diagnosed with Bipolar II and ADD didn’t help. Even on my good days I feel pretty blah.
I did National Novel Writing Month last year and got 25,000 words. But since then I have been in the toilet writing-wise. I either have no inspiration, or no desire to write. Such a bummer.
I wanted to be a poet. I started writing poetry when I was 14. I started writing again twenty years ago and got some rave reviews from people that matter. But, as I am wont to do, I more or less gave up out of fear. I haven’t really written a poem for five years.
When I was twenty-something, I was pretty much a foodie and moved to NYC to work as an editorial assistant for a cookbook publisher. Early on, I had the occasion to call the editor of Gourmet magazine, a truly delightful woman who wanted to meet me and take me to lunch. I was too afraid to go.
I wanted to be a really, really great mother. I started out gangbusters. I really do feel that I screwed up royally. My grown children love me and most assuredly feel loved. I just never really taught them to take risks, be strong, and be responsible. I didn’t teach them the value of hard work.
I won’t have the opportunity to fix any of this. I could write more poems more seriously and probably will. But the right moment for these dreams has passed.
I wanted to have a kid in a good situation (i.e. not being 17) and see what that’s like. But now I’m 31 and it will never happen. Oh well. Kids are stupid anyway.
I should probably explain that it’s not any travel ever agsin which I know I can’t do. It’s the idea of just going out and travelling somewhere just because. I’ve envied my younger sibling who has had the opportunity and the will to just get in his car and go because he can; he’s never been quite so tied down. That opportunity is something I’ll never have: I can still go places, but it’s always going to be planned, limited, and organized from the beginning.
I didn’t say it had to be the single most important thing in the world. This is not about the most horrible thing ever. This is just what my dream is; your dream could be different. And it doesn’t have to make sense to anybody else.
One was to play Major League Baseball. In particular play second base for the Cleveland Indians and lead the league in triples and stolen bases. Now that one I realized at a fairly young age I’d never accomplish as I was poor in all sorts.
But I really did think we’d have a real space station and a moon base by 2001 as in the movie and I’d be able to travel there.
It’s odd, but I don’t have many regrets. Don’t laugh: the only thing that I can think of is bungee-jumping. I fantasized about it, but never got around to it. I have arthritis now, so it wouldn’t be a good idea.
I wanted to be a professional bowler and go on the PBA tour. I got to the AAA leagues, one might say. I was carrying a 203 average and was winning money consistently in local tournaments. I came down with rheumatoid arthritis and had to quit bowling for 25 years.
Thanks to medications, I’ve been able to start bowling again but I know I will never get back to that level and the PBA will remain just a dream.
Got my college girlfriend pregnant. She wanted nothing to do with me after and I signed away my parental rights. But I still think about him and how he might have turned out. I’m ashamed with myself that I never made an effort to reach out to contact him but I’m also afraid of what he thought of me not being there.
Encouraging my wife to try to save our son. She had experienced lots of miscarriages in the second trimester. We had tried a cervical cerclage but her cervix kept funneling and the amniotic sack was slipping down. The doctor suggested an abdominal cerclage might save the pregnancy. I did some quick research and saw that there was a 70% success rate doing the procedure during pregnancy. We knew that if we didn’t do anything we would lose him anyway. My wife was emotionally wrecked already so I kept stressing the positives and the odds. She agreed and so at 20 weeks they did the surgery.
The operation was a success and we could see our son floating safely in the sack. But two days later, with no warning, the water broke. My wife had never even gotten out of the hospital bed. The only way to get him out was to do an emergency C-section. They cut along the incisions, essentially giving her two C-sections in less than a week. Our son, Tommy, was too small to even attempt to save as a preemie and he died in my hands, living only 30 minutes.
While recovering from the operation my wife developed a fever but was still discharged from the hospital. On the day we buried our son the incision burst open, draining blood, pus and fluid. It turned out she had a massive infection. It ate through her abdomen down to the fascia layer over the intestines. She wound up with an abdominal hernia and an open wound almost 6 inches in diameter and 2 inches deep. She used up all of her maternity, FMLA and short term disability but was still in no condition to go back to work. She lost her job, has had over 40 abdominal surgeries (including 4 hernia repairs) to repair the damage and still has an open wound after 10 years. Her belly is a mass of scar tissue and she is in almost constant pain.
She is on social security disability because she can’t sit or walk for a long time which keeps her from working and she has to take heavy pain meds to cope with the scarring. Without the substantial income she used to bring in we have had to cash in our 401k’s and the money we had saved for our remaining children’s college, have filed for bankruptcy and are barely keeping our heads above water.
If I hadn’t pushed the surgery we would have lost our son anyway. But my wife would have not had the infection, she could have kept working, she wouldn’t keep blaming herself for our financial problems. All these years on she would still be grieving the loss just as she does for our other lost babies but it would be tempered by her not having a daily reminder every time she has to repack the open wound.
Just about everything I really wanted to do, I have done. Exceptions are things that have probably always been beyond me – to ride in a rocket, for example.
This is not to say there aren’t things I still want to do. Many of these involve travel and I fully expect to do them. I hope to live long enough to see my now 3 YO granddaughter grow up. If she wants to go to college I’ll finance it if her parents can’t. I’d love to see a great-grandchild, too.
Things I have done that I always wanted to do: get married, have children, work in interesting fields (teaching, data processing, international commerce), learn to fly a plane, see the northern lights, go to Tahiti and Hawaii, see a total eclipse of the sun (4 times so far), retire with enough money to live on comfortably.
Most dreams that I have are still possible. It’s just a matter of picking one and working at it until it happens. But, at 41, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I will never have children. I’m getting too old, my health is too chancy, and there isn’t even a hint of a relationship that might lead to marriage and children.
So, like Johnny L.A., I’m going to go with “have a family”.
Well, hiking. And dancing. And running. Or walking for any significant distance.
I was born with club feet, and have had many corrective surgeries. In grade school I was just a bit slower running, and occasionally had pain. Puberty awakened whole new areas of pain I never knew existed. It was manageable until after college, when a trip to dr about increasing pain revealed that my right foot a horrible mess, and was in danger of collapsing on it’s own. The surgeries following this immobilized my ankle and left me with severe nerve damage. Now I’m in constant pain, I can’t move more than a brisk walking pace, and actually walking on it feels like I’m walking on a sprained ankle. And it’s only going to get worse. I will be in a wheelchair eventually.
Traveling, sightseeing, doing anything in the wilderness, everything like that is lost to me.
We got great reviews.