What do you want to be when you grow up?

I’m sure we all remember being asked this common childhood question when we were younger.

When asking a five year old what they want to be when they grow up, nine out of ten times you will most likely end up with a comical answer. Little boys want to grow up to be firefighters, ninjas or Spiderman; while little girls aspire to be a ballerina, a princess or perhaps even a fairy.

Me, you ask?
What did I want to be when I was little?

I wanted to be a “Garbage Lady.”
That’s right a G-a-r-b-a-g-e    L-a-d-y.

I can explain…

As a little girl, I can vividly remember looking out the front window, watching and waiting for the garbage truck to arrive. (Must I remind everyone, I am an only child and it’s the little things in life that amuse me?) Two times a week, the big blue truck would come up and down the street. This was a three man job that involved one driver and two guys hanging off the back. The two guys hanging off the back of the truck would hop on and off at each house, then continue to ride around the block just leaning off the back end.

To me, this seemed like the coolest job ever! At five years old, who doesn’t want to hang off the back of a moving vehicle without a harness, or leash or helmet? The whole concept seemed so freeing to me. I so badly wanted to ride around on the back of that big blue dump truck hanging on with only one hand. The fact that the job involved dealing with trash, and even had the name ‘garbage’ in the job title didn’t matter to me. All that mattered was my obsession with hanging off the back of that truck while riding down the road.

My dad soon caught on to this new obsession and used it a time or two to his advantage. Whenever we would have dinner parties with guests, or take a trip to visit some of his fellow buddies…he would nudge me and say: “Hey Mare, why don’t you tell them what you want to be when you grow up?”

With a toothless grin, I would smile and proudly declare:
“I want to be a garbage lady!”

He probably got a good six months out of me and this one liner- until I changed my mind and decided I wanted to be something else.

The moral of the story is “Do what you love and love what you do.” If I still thought that a garbage lady was the coolest job on earth, I would have no problem at all getting up at the crack of dawn to ride around town on that hunk of steel, collecting trash bins one by one. Whether your life path leads you to be a doctor, a lawyer, a mother, a teacher, a salesman or a secretary…. I believe that when you find that something that gets you excited to get out of bed and start the day…then you have found it. You have found what it is that you wanted to be.