PC, my Mom went a bit crazy when she heard my brother was planning to go to New Zealand to study Outdoor Education.
Even though my brother had done the same thing for the past 5 yrs and earned a nice living and was well liked by his employers Mom still kept saying "But what's he going to do! He'll get this degree and won't be able to get a job and then he'll starve!"
It seriously freaked her out becuase it's so different from anything my brother ever expressed doing and it was something out side her comfort zone. Finally after reminding her about my brother's job (at the time) and that he had skills she stopped flipping out. But it took months. And I think she still has these panics but she doesn't mention them.
ita is wise. And, to cross-pollinate a little, there's no need to for you to be figuring out what you'll do if the writing doesn't work out. Just try to make it work out, for now.
Many years ago, my oldest sister decided to go to Finland for some semester abroad business school thing. She decided to take a side trip to the Soviet Union, as it then was, and my mother desperately tried to talk her out of it. She was certain my sister was going to disappear into a gulag somewhere off this carefully organized and guided tour to St. Petersburg.
Parents are not always level-headed.
Oldest sister is currently alive and well and living in the Bay Area as a mortgage analyst. If there were any adventures in Cold War St. Petersburg, she never shared them with me.
Parents are not always level-headed.
To say the least. When I came out to my parents (at age 28, not to mention 10 years after I went off to school and, really, stopped being an everyday physical presence in their lives), their response was to (1) tell me that I was not gay, because they knew me too well to believe that was possible, and (2) to seek psychiatric treatment.
I spent several days writing back, to make sure I was being reasonable (and both of my beta readers told me I'd succeeded). Their response to that started, "We don't know how you could have written such a mean-spirited letter."
The situation went downhill from there.
