When I Grow Up

By Elaine Viets

What did you want to be when you grew up? a friend asked a group of women.

Annie Oakley, several women said  – and many of them didn’t have a gun in their house.

Amelia Earhart. A princess, said another.

Now the career choices came thick and fast: An oceanographer. A veterinarian. A teacher. A writer.

The woman who wanted to be a teacher became one.  So did the writer. They were born for those careers.

I wanted to be a Pink Sister.

That’s right – a cloistered nun who wore a pink habit and prayed all day.

Once you stop laughing, you’ll understand why that wasn’t such a wacky career choice for me.  I was the oldest daughter in a family with three rambunctious boys. At age nine, a life of perpetual, peaceful silence seemed heavenly. The sisters’ chapel had an unearthly beauty, and I looked good in pink.

Other sisters set me on a less holy path. The sisters at St. Thomas Aquinas high school  decided that I could write and steered me to a career as a newspaper reporter.

I knew all about newspapers. I read "Brenda Starr" in the comics section. Brenda had great clothes, good travel and romance. No kids, either.

Most days, I blessed the sisters for their career guidance. Newspapers gave me an adventurous life  until I started killing people 1997. That’s when I wrote my first mystery.

Sister Valeria put the ka-bosh on my last, lingering impulse to be a nun. In high school, the poor woman punished me for talking in class by making me sit with the boys.

Sister Valeria was nearly ninety. I’m sure being surrounded by rowdy young boys was her personal hell. But for a teenage girl?

That punishment was the answer to my prayers.

 

What did you want to be when you grew up? Did you reach your goal or become something else?

Comments

[Karen in Ohio]

Yes, the golden years, when ancient, childless nuns were expected to guide Catholic young people, despite their utter cluelessness. I can so see you as a Pink Nun, Elaine!

My childhood friend and I just had the revelation, yesterday, that we both decided to become nuns after an eighth grade field trip to the convent that supplied the nuns for our grade school. And we each equally decided against it pretty soon afterwards. My reason was there were no boys in the convent.

I always wanted to be a writer, and a fashion designer. And I've done both. Now I'm trying to decide what else I want to be. :-)

[Elaine Viets]

I bet you won't be entering the convent any time soon, Karen.
No boys in the convent was a major drawback to that career for me. Although I understand the ancient Irish sisters did have husbands -- and a far more feminist society than we have now.

[Mary S.]

This is the first I've heard of pink nuns. Must've been anti-establishement rebels. :)

One of my favorite movies is The Trouble With Angels. Funny and a great cast. Sca-a-athingly brilliant. :)

[Marcia Talley]

Oh, Elaine, I see what you mean about the pink habits! You would look smashing in one of them! The black oxfords would have to go, however.

When I was very small, I wanted to be a cowgirl. Every year I asked for a cowgirl suit, a six-shooter and a pony. When Santa never came thru, I decided I wanted to be a nurse, like my mom. Sometime in the 7th grade, though, probably under the influence of Nancy Drew, I started writing mysteries -- horrible Nancy Drew/Hardy Boy ripoffs set in exotic locations like ghost towns in the West. My mom, who was a charter subscriber to EQMM, never discouraged me, and my dad, bless him, let me stay up late on a school night to watch Alfred Hitchcock. My great sadness is that neither of them lived to see my first mystery novel published.

May I say, in closing, how glad I am that you didn't become a nun?

[Elaine Viets]

The nuns I liked at school were the subversive ones, Mary. I wonder what they would be now, when women have more career opportunities. They were smart enough to recognize that I wasn't proper Catholic mother material.

[Elaine Viets]

You're setting your myseries in some pretty exotic locations these days, Marcia -- Bahamian islands, as I recall.

[Storyteller Mary]

The pink sisters have some power! -- they defied weather predictions to pray in good weather for the Pope's visit . . . still glad you didn't join them. We would miss your writing.
I taught with a woman who had been a nun -- broke free for marriage and children and teaching high school English.
I always knew I wanted to teach, and I think my rowdy brothers toughened me up for the job . . .

[Elaine Viets]

Brothers make good teacher boot camps, Mary.