My memories of being little are quite fuzzy. It may have happened New Year’s Eve 1999 when I was five years old. I stayed up late in our living room staring at the TV, watching the mirror ball drop in Times Square with my mom. They had several acts leading up to the new year, pop singers and entertainers. The only one that I remember was Ricky Martin. Do you need to ask why? I watched him dance on stage and sing in Spanish with such passion, surrounded by backup dancers in the bright lights. I looked up at my mom and asked quizzically, “Can I do that?” The standard answer for many 90s parents to young girls, as with my mom, was, “You can be anything you want to be.” That was the first time that I remember her saying that to me, and it helped set the tone for my ambitions as a tiny human being, and as a woman. It’s important for kids, especially girls, to hear that the sky is the limit.
It wasn’t that I wanted to be Ricky Martin when I grew up. It wasn’t that I wanted to grow up to dance and sing in Spanish. On second thought, if I woke up tomorrow as Shakira I would literally die of happiness. It wasn’t really that at all. As I young girl, I wanted to grow up to do something that made me as happy as Ricky Martin was singing on stage. I wanted something that made my soul sing. Today, I feel like I have that. Writing makes me feel like Ricky Martin on stage. Being able to impact people’s lives makes me feel like he does when the lights come down and he hears the roar of the crowd. When I write I feel like I’ve tapped into my truest self, the one that was there all along. It was just like how I felt watching Ricky Martin, thinking that at one point he was just a kid too, looking up at someone else in awe.
Whether you ask your kids one million times, and you get one million different answers, it’s still important to be familiar with their goals. I think for me it changed almost every year. I always wanted to write, but I also knew that money was an issue. I remember wanting to be a veterinarian, a mall Santa, a teacher, a psychologist, a school counselor, etc. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten to ask these questions to the young ones around me. Some of them had never been asked before, but I got to witness that horribly ambitious spark ignite within them. Whether it changes every day, it’s important to start that conversation. What are the things that you enjoy doing? What is fun for you? Do you want to go to school? If no one else cares, then why should they?
