What A Girl Wants

Do you honestly believe that there is at least one thing that absolutely everyone wants? Could we ever agree? This question came up at the dinner table recently when my very persistent son, who has a bright future in automotive sales, was working on his fourth attempt to convince his parents that we wanted the video game he was coveting as much as he wanted it. He’s young and he hasn’t quite figured out that we don’t all want the same thing. If this were true then there would be a run on my favorite things, namely the Chocolate Pecan Mudslide at Dairy Queen and three inch pumps with cute wraps that circle the ankle. But it’s obviously not true since, during a recent trip to the bathroom, I noticed that the woman in the stall next door was wearing hideous brown suede tennis shoes. It was like looking at the offspring of Shaquille O-Neal and the chick from the Progressive Insurance commercials—some things are just innately wrong. Shoes can either be athletic or they can be suede but mating the two only yields the “sensible” shoe, a shoe no designer would ever touch.




I’m also grateful we all don’t want to drive the same car because then I’d have even more trouble remembering where I parked and there’s no way I’m using back-window decals as my car identifier. I’m not sure why some random motorist thinks I should know, by way of cutesy cartoon characters mooning me from the back window, that she’s married with two goofy looking kids and a dog but apparently it’s important (to her, not me.)

Knowing my luck, if we all wanted to drive the same car, it would probably be one of those egg-shaped cars some genius auto-designer modeled after the apple-car that the worm drives in the Richard Scarry books. I’m pretty sure that my high heels would force my knees into my chest making it impossible to drive—and then I’d be really ticked because that would mean that I’d have to wear “sensible” shoes all the time. Ugg! Kill me now. It’s amazing Communism ever took off because I’ve just punched several convincing holes into the idea that life would be bliss as long as it’s equal.

The list of the things I want in my life is as complex and contradictory as I’m sure your list is. I want Eva Longoria’s body, but I don’t want to have to diet and exercise to get it. I want to be one of those Brady-esque moms who bake treats and make amazing science projects but and there a lot of times just hearing my children’s little voices gives me a headache. I want to be a published writer (that actually makes money), but what if I don’t like signing books or talking to Oprah? What can I say? I’m a woman and that automatically makes me as difficult to figure out as a Rubic’s Cube.

Since I’ve somehow melded Oprah with my writing career, it’s obvious I dream big but I’ve also never had big dream come true so it seems like a fruitless want. My son’s big dream is to be a football player, he’s also dreamed of being a chef and an animal doctor. I have another son who dreams of being rich so that he can drive a cool car. My daughter wants to be a princess but I don’t have the heart to tell her how few monarchies still exist or how strongly I oppose the whole idea of a monarchy. And I recognize how unlikely it is that my children will see all their dreams come true, or if they do come true, how likely it is that the reality won’t look much like the dream. But it doesn’t keep us from dreaming.

I’ve stumbled upon the one thing that we all want. We all want the dream and the freedom to work toward it. Maybe that’s what makes the rest of the world so crazy mad at the free world—we have the one thing they want.