194 Days ’til 40: Disappointing Childhood Desires

 

Okay, I want to know – how many of you out there really wanted sea monkeys when you were little?  I read Archie comic books and I LOVED the advertisements in them.  I wanted my own sea monkey family – you know the one, right?  Where mom wears lipstick and there is a dad and two sea monkey kids and we can watch them grow up and do all the sorts of sea monkey things they do, like sit at a breakfast table (the photo shows them doing that!)

All of my childhood I wanted sea monkeys…. so did my partner.  They were this silly little fantasy that never came to be.  Recently I bought my partner sea monkeys, as a fun little gift because she always wanted them as a child – our girls were very excited…..  we set up the “tank” (we bought the cheap version shipped from Hong Kong, so the tank was a little glass bowl, a tad pathetic)….. we put in the salt water and we added the eggs…. and a day later we had these little dots floating around…. like some sort of weird ant infestation, ,but in water…..

Sea monkeys…. so this was what I was missing out on?  I dreamed about sea monkeys, I could not wait to watch them grow up – but they did not really form those families I had imagined……  the hard, sad, truth emerged….. they were nothing but little brine shrimp, too small to eat and very boring.

Today, 194 days ’til 40, I realize that some childhood dreams are not so exciting when they become reality in adulthood.  I also realize that some childhood dreams that did not become reality were not critical losses…. and perhaps the loss of these dreams even amounted to a gain.

~400daystil40