"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

The four year old looked up from her picture book and found her aunt peeking down at her, eyes shining. "I… em..., I don't know."

"Do you want to be an astronaut? You seem mighty involved in that space book."

An Astronaut. She's never thought about that before. Wow, wouldn't it be cool to be an astronaut, to blast off into space and to zoom through the stars? Her aunt however, must have taken her silence to mean indifference.

"Oh, I get it. You want to be an astronomer instead, like Newton or Galileo."

She had absolutely no idea who this Galileo was but Newton's fame was such than even the four year old could instantly recall the apocryphal about the apple tree. That didn't sound nearly as exciting as an astronaut but her aunt’s face was shining with such pride that the little girl simply didn’t have to the heart to tell her aunt so. She nodded instead and that was that. Her aunt, of course, instantly informed the extended family of the little girl’s lofty career aspiration and everyone was immensely proud.

It was only a couple of year later that she heard the question again.

It was the first day of grade school and the teacher thought it would be just so adorable to hear what her class wanted to be when they grew up. Everyone was hesitant before speaking, everyone that is, except the little girl. Word had spread about her desire to become an astronomer and she had been showered with age-appropriate books about space from adults ever since. Her father even invested in a small telescope in the back yard. She has already seen three meteor showers, three! She even knew who Galileo and Kepler both were. She was sure no one in her class could say the same. When her turn came, she got up and, without hesitation, proudly informed the class of her goal and listed her already impressive accomplishments.

The teacher smiled of course, as adults often did in the presence of precocious little girls. “Wow, an astronomer. You must really like math then.”

The girl frowned. Math? She said she wanted to be an astronomer. What did math have to do with it? The teacher must have heard wrong. The little girl’s day, however, was ruined. The teacher’s comment nagged her all afternoon. She felt she had to ask her mother that night, to make sure. She was crushed by her mother’s reply.

“Why, of course astronomers need math. Did you know that Newton was the one who invented calculus? Newton and Leibniz that is, but …”

The girl was no longer listening. Being only six, she had only heard of calculus in passing mentions by her cousin. To her, calculus had become the emblem of impossibly hard, esoteric math and she hated math class. It was the most boring part of her day.

The next morning, the little girl’s mother founded all of the girl’s previously treasured astronomy books dumped in the recycling bin. That was the end of the girl’s first career goal.

Having a dream shattered is a hard thing to recover from so it is understandable that although the girl was asked that same dreaded question many times over the next few years, she always refrained from answering.

Sure, in grade four, there was that short lived cryptographer phase brought on by Sherlock Holmes and the Dancing Men, but that had ended almost as soon as it began when she found out it was another math related career. Right, there was also that phase in grade eight, during the height of Law and Order’s popularity, when she had wanted to be a lawyer. That phase ended when the class went on a field trip to the court house in Kingston and the girl was bored to tears after not even half an hour in the court room.

As she got older, the not-so-little girl realized that the answer “I don’t know” simply stopped satisfying adults. They wanted you to know and would go doggedly at the question until you gave them at least something. So she got creative. She told them that she wanted to be a chemist, a pediatrician, a judge and whatever else she thought they wanted to hear. She just wanted them to leave her alone. She was however, careful to not give the same answer too often for she had learned from her first mistake.

In grade ten, the dreaded careers course came. Unquestionably the easiest and most useless compulsory course in high school, careers created more questions than it answered. After finishing, the girl knew she was a visual learner and that she was an INTJ on the Briggs-Meyers Characterization Test but still had no clue as to what she had wanted to be when she “grew up”.

Then, the final deadline loomed before her. It was the start of her senior year in high school and the question came almost without end now. Everyone she met, after discovering her age, wanted to know what she wanted to be when she grew up: scholarship committees, her driving instructor, the sales lady at the mall, even her aunt’s childhood friend’s son’s fiancée. She had never cared before but now a feeling was growing at the pit of her stomach. She indeed still didn’t know. Asking the question over and over wasn’t helping her one bit. She knew what she was good at and what subjects interested her but wasn’t she still a bit young to pick a career that she would stick with for the rest of her life? If so, why was everyone still asking her without end?

One day she shared her fears with her friend and her friend admitted that she too had no satisfactory answer to that age old question. Her friend had also added that no one she had talked to really knew for sure either.

“You should just do what I do,” Another friend, whose average has never dipped below a 95, confided after hearing about the girl’s woes. “tell them you want to be a vending machine operator.”

“A what?”

“A vending machine operator, you know, the people that refill vending machines. Be completely deadpanned about it and people will eventually stop asking.”

The girl tried it and indeed it had worked to a certain extent. People never knew if she was being serious or not and no one had wanted to risk her feelings by asking further. Some people shrugged, maybe vending machine operators made good money.

This brief lull, however, came to an end when her parents had gotten wind of her answer and decided to sit her down to have a serious discussion about her future. She was forced to admit the truth. She was seventeen going on eighteen. Within months, she would be old enough to vote. Legally speaking at least, she had grown up yet she was still no closer to the answer of that age-old question.

Once again, she was forced to bear the barrage of questions about her career aspirations. What was worse was that the question was now no longer limited to being asked verbally. University and scholarship applications also loved the question. They seemed to think it was a fantastic way of getting to know an applicant. So, the girl fell back on her old tactics: tell them what they wanted to hear. After all, it wouldn’t be lying if she herself didn’t know the truth. They already knew what programs she had applied to and therefore knew as much about her career aspirations as she herself could say for sure. What exactly did they want anyways? Were they really expecting the question to reveal something insightful about the character of the applicant? If so, didn’t they know anything about teenagers? A statistic about career changes and changing majors in university came to mind but she thought it best not to include that in her reply. It would have sounded too cheeky and not at all humble, even if it was the truth.

Then one day, as the girl opened yet another university application, she quickly scanned the questions. All right… nothing too strange…except that last question: “If there were one question which should not be asked, what would the question be and why?” huh…that was a vague thing to ask, wasn’t it? The first answer that popped to her mind was “This one. ‘Cause it’s dumb” but the selection committee probably wouldn’t appreciate that too much.

Oh well, she thought as she puzzled over the unusual question, at least they had sense enough not to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. If I never hear THAT question again, it would be too soon.