When I was five years old, I had a variety of hopes and dreams about what adulthood would be like. I've been thinking about how life has and hasn't lived up to my expectations. What did I expect?

Taste. You know how adults are always eating these foods that most kids can't stand? And how most kids have sweet teeth? Well, when I was little, I really, really, really wanted to like grown up food. Like, say, onions. Once when I was five, we had split pea soup for supper and I accidentally ate an onion and I liked it! I was thrilled. I exclaimed excitedly that my grown up taste was coming in. My mother held me down to take my temperature and -oops- I had a pretty high fever.

I so far haven't developed the adult sense of taste that my younger self was so desirous of, but I do eat and enjoy eating a much wider variety of foods. However, I don't think I'm ever going to like asparagus or tahini or peppers or any of the other things that looked adult to me then.

Candy. I'm sure I wasn't alone in my dream that one day, I was going to have so much candy, there just wouldn't be an end to it (no, this is not quite a contradiction with the dream above). My adult self does in fact get to eat a lot more candy than my 5 year old self did, but that's mostly because my 5 year old self got two pieces per week at the synagogue and that was it. I found, when I was about 10 and could buy candy if I wanted to, that eating a lot of candy made me sick, plus I like having money more than I like candy. Who would have guessed? So like the above, this wish has been lived out less than my 5 year old self was hoping, but I still live the dream more than he did.

Confidence. I hoped that once I was an adult, I would know what was what. I think that in an intellectual way, I've gotten where my preschool self wanted to go. I have a good enough understanding of how the world works. But on the emotional level, the hope of never being scared and always knowing what to do- I don't think age is going to do the trick there. I was a pretty independent kid and I'm a pretty independent adult; but I was a scared kid and I'm an equally scared adult.

Particular Skills. I wanted to learn a few things: mostly, I wanted to learn to blow a bubble in bubblegum. I also wanted to learn how to tie my shoes.  I did learn to blow a bubble; I think I was eight when that happened. I was nine when I learned to tuck my shoelaces so I didn't trip, and fourteen or so when I learned to tie my shoes.

I notice that the list above doesn't include some of the things that feature prominantly in my life today. I didn't really think much about my health or disability when I was five, other than to pretend that I couldn't walk or whatever. So that's not here. My gender I did think about when I was in preschool, and I thought about it a lot, but I didn't know back then that there was anybody at all like me in that respect, and so I didn't have much expectations in that regards. Hopes, wishes, prayers, fears- but not expectations. I did think about having children when I was very young, but this was mostly along the lines of a game. Like my brother used to say, "When I grow up, I'm going to have nine million sons and two daughters" and that was about the extent to which we thought about having kids.