Hard Decisions: In Defense of the Vanilla I Have Chosen

I once had a teacher share a story about a sports team whose motto was “Vanilla. Choose the hard thing!” (or something like that). The saying was supposed to represent the difficulty in life when decisions have to be made. In an ice cream shop filled with many options, what's harder than skipping the extravagance and going for the plain, boring, and traditional vanilla? Sometimes those are the decisions that have to be made, right?

But there are people who actually like vanilla. On a recent trip to the store, my little sister was allowed to choose the ice cream. After looking over all the options, she opted for vanilla. As my mom and I teased her about how unacceptable vanilla was (“What sorts of choices will you make in your life if you can't even properly choose ice cream flavors?”) and she pretended she had made a hasty decision (“Cookies and cream? Yeah! I didn't even see that one!”), we went with the more interesting flavor and abandoned vanilla. But I could see by the look in her eyes that she really would have liked vanilla. After all, when you rarely get ice cream, even vanilla is a treat.

As a vanilla person myself, I understand this. And when I say I'm a “vanilla person,” I don't simply mean that I enjoy vanilla Frostys more than their original counterpart. I mean that I'm somewhat bland in comparison to some of the other people here in the ice cream shop of life. I don't skydive and live dangerously. I'm not gorgeous or famous. I'm not trying to cure cancer or rid the world of hunger because I've already accepted that those aren't the stars for which I'm shooting anymore.

It wasn't an easy conclusion. Like every child in America, I was raised on school assignments of “What Would You Do If You Were President of the United States?” and fantasies of becoming a pop star over night. Admitting my mediocrity in the world was tough—and I'm not saying this in a dejected, woe-is-me way. I'm just saying, in a matter-of-fact way, that I'm like everyone else. I mean, I think I'm cool, but it's just an average kind of cool. So, I gave up my more far-fetched ambitions of being a real-life princess-astronaut who moonlights as Bill Nye the Science Guy's assistant and “settled” for something rather vanilla by comparison that I had dreamed of doing far before anything else.

Thus, I became a mother. And I do believe that so far, it has rivaled my previous dreams for excitement, joy, and all-out flavor. The thing about vanilla ice cream, choices, and people is that we are flexible. We go well with chocolate syrup, birthday cake, and sprinkles. We do well in all sorts of circumstances, and no matter what the other options might have been. And as one who likes vanilla, I'm quite happy with the choice I have made, hard as it may have been. I've got all the sweetness I could ever want.