I’ve been in publishing for thirty-three years. I feel like I’m eighteen and wish I hadn’t partied so hard the night before taking the SATS. But my parents were out of town. What choice exactly did I have? Did I want to work in publishing? No. I wanted to run Paramount Films. I wanted to be a psychiatrist. I wanted to be a potter in Vermont and marry a quiet man. I wanted to write poems and self-destruct. I actually gave that the college try. LOL. I wanted to be in a writers’ room. I wanted to be a part of something smaller than myself. I did not want to be a hero, a victim, or a face in the crowd. I wanted to be free.
What did you want to be.
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Betsy Lerner 
A writer, dancer, singer, actress…
A faster runner, (these days just to run period would be good) a violinist a singer, a dancer, a climber. I have more wants, but those were at the top of the list.
I actually bought a violin and haven’t touched it in ten years or more. No time.
What did I want to be? When?
I wanted to be everything. One night when I was nineteen — Hey, nineteen, we can’t dance together, we can’t talk at all — but that night, I sat in my car, the fabled ’65 ‘Cuda, on a desert road just north of El Paso, and I smoked a joint and I thought about what I really wanted to do, to be, to get in and out of life. I was already a very minorly published poet, journalist, and photographer. I was already a father, as far as I knew. But what did I really want? I knew I wanted to be a writer and an artist. I knew I wanted to fuck — not necessarily precisely at that moment, but I was a nineteen year-old male human, which tends to be a case study in fuckerism. I knew I wanted to feel good, hence the joint I was smoking. But what did I really want?
It came to me with the clarity, the honesty, the certainty, that the marijuana high could provide, that what I really wanted to be was God. I thought, Well, that job is already taken, and the waiting list for new hires is probably pretty long. With that realization came the liberation to be whoever the fuck it was I was and would come to be.
I had a red ‘65 ‘cuda too and no one could beat me on the streets or the drag strips in Mo. I was blond and stupid. I’m not blond anymore.
A writer and a father.
I wanted to marry my sweetheart. We met in Jo’berg South Africa. Alas, I went back to the states and he went home to Cape Town.
a writer, a geologist, a violinist, an editor, a naturalist
A ballerina, a singer, a doctor, a writer, a wife, a mother. I wanted to be famous (ha!), but alas a star was never born.
Dilettante that I am, two and a half have been fulfilled, including the last two. If I could rewind I’d have thought about it longer and harder when I was young, and devoted myself entirely to one.
However, I am thoroughly enjoying newly being a grandmother, something I never thought about, had no control over, and it’s one huge delight.
I wanted to be his beloved. I wanted be able to still fit into my wedding dress 40 years later. I wanted to be recognized for two particularly worthy endeavors, but instead, was sabotaged by a rival. I’ve also wanted to be someone -anyone- else, until I learned that we all carry secrets.
When I was a teenager I wanted to be a social worker, but a friend of my mother’s told me social work was frustrating and full of despair. I said “Maybe I should be a writer,” but my mother said writers have very hard lives. She was right. I’m a coward, so trying to be a professional writer when I was young would have been too risky for me. Later I wanted to be an environmental lawyer, but that didn’t work out, so I became a community organizer. Next I wanted to be a mother. I realized I needed a career that let me spend evenings with my family and days doing something constructive, so I worked in book publishing for 35 years. Now I’ve circled back to writing. It feels like a good idea now.