Greetings, dear Hivers
This is my entry to @zord189’s Childhood Dreams #HiveCreativeContest. See details here
Justice without Pain
Childhood dreams are a wonderful and complex topic. Unless they have been carefully and faithfully documented, they may be a mix of accidental inclinations and adults’ projections based on assumptions from children’s playing preferences. I do not have early recollections of my childhood dreams or the stories adults around me told regarding what I said I wanted to be when I grew up.
So, I will tell you about what I do remember I wanted to be at some point during my childhood. One of the earliest dreams I remember was related to one of my major frustrations: my mother’s health.
Since she had her 3rd child, my mother started to suffer from terrible migraines (I was the 7th, so she had been like that for about 15 years by the time I remember seeing her struggle with those pains). We are talking about excruciating pain that made her cry all night long, sometimes, several days in a raw, year after year. Even though these “episodes” were not a daily occurrence, they took a toll on her and on all of us. My mother was a hard worker, mother of 8, whose husband was a national guard who was away almost all the time. She could not afford the luxury of resting. We did not have a real hospital in town. Specialists were not available in hundreds of miles around, so, like most adults in rural areas, my mother just swallowed her bitter pill and prayed for a bright morning on those dark nights.
I remember being mortified every time I saw her sitting on the rocking chair early in the morning. That meant she had spent the whole night awake because of the headache. I found that to be the cruelest thing in the world. My mother was a good and useful person. She did not deserve to live in pain.
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Thus, I started to dream that I became the doctor who found the cure to migraines and many other diseases. When I started school and realized that I was actually really good at studies, and was fascinated about sciences, I started to seriously consider that that dream might as well become a reality.
It was so until I graduated from High School and hit the wall of impossibilities. Despite my qualifications, there were many buts at the idea of having to live in a big city (Ciudad Bolivar, Merida, or Caracas), very far from home, no relatives to help me, and not enough money to cover the most expensive career in our universities.
Maybe I should take advantage of the new normality and get a degree now that our universities do not even require a physical building or labs for scientists to get degrees.
I try to think about what my life would have been like had I gotten the support of some relatives or friends. Fortunatelly, my mother’s pains receded years later. She still gets an occasional headache but nothing compared with the brutal migraine attacks of old. Maybe it was for the better that I did not become a doctor because along with the dream of healing my mother and any other poor person around I also got from my father’s occupation the idea of delivering justice in a world plagued by crooks and criminals. My father sometimes left his service weapons at home. We were instructed never to touch them, and we never did. I never developed any attraction for weapons. I was fully aware of the damage they caused and never understood people’s fascination with them and with developing more and more destructive ones. I knew then weapons wouldnot be my thing.
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Consequently, at some point I fantasized that could combine being a doctor who saved lives worth saving with ridding the world from people who seemed to have come to this world only to create havoc (murderers, rapists, thieves, corrupt politicians, you name them). I had read my fair share of comic books by age 6 and was fully aware of the risks of taking justice on one’s own hands, but the idea was always tempting.
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