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Some notes to my 16-year-old self:
You’re not as smart as you think you are. Shut up sometimes.
You’re smarter than you think you are. Speak up, but thoughtfully.
Be kinder. Be more patient. Be more demanding. These are not mutually exclusive.
You can’t see your own privilege. Listen more, and put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
Good job with the sunscreen! Keep it up even after your gothy years pass by.
Your parents show their love as best they can, and they’re doing miles better than their own parents did for them. That doesn’t mean it’s enough. The sooner you see that and let it go, the happier and more loving you will be.
I recently spent five minutes on the phone pretending to be a proper grown-up. It was exhausting.
I’ve been putting off minor oral surgery for, oh, a couple of years… and the delay in treatment means it’s become a major oral surgery. Yikes. Why did I put it off? Well, it’s a spicy melange of denial, constitutional inertia, poverty, dread of the dental chair (which inevitably sparks my vicious back spasms), and sheer bonechilling dental phobia.
This Mighty Girl post mentioning jaw grafts and cadaver bone didn’t help; the idea is simultaneously fascinating, inspiring (sign your donor cards, folks!), and immediately viscerally horrifying.
So I had to shut up the constant chattering voices in my head that loop around and around your tooth your back your bank account it’s urgent it’s an emergency maybe tomorrow cadaver bone! you have to do this now graft abscess impacted it’s going to hurt you can’t afford it it’s so awful in there OH MY GOD WHAT WILL THEY FIND IN THERE UNDER THE HALF-ROTTED TOOTH and make the necessary arrangements to get it yanked. Well, really what I’ve made are the necessary arrangements to make the arrangements to get it yanked, but anything’s better than nothing and movement is better than inertia.
Just subduing the panicky child inside me long enough to make that preliminary appointment — describing the problem, describing the situation I created all on my own, admitting to my own slack self-care and not getting bogged down in my crippling phobia— brought my heart into my throat and reminded me how often I feel like a child masquerading as an adult.
But then I remember: most people don’t feel like proper adults. (clean all the things?) Most people are making it up as they go along, subduing their fears and laziness and ignorance long enough to make progress, doing the best they can when they can do their best, and muddling along the rest of the time.
Everyone I know is just trying to work it out as best they can. And most of them are doing okay.
Me, too.
Years ago, I was working at friend’s home business during her most hectic season, which happened to coincide with a home repair project that temporarily changed the lay-out… and therefore changed many of her usual processes and procedures. One busy-busy day as we re-arranged the ad-hoc stores of goods while carefully balancing new stock on our hips, she exclaimed in frustration, “This is NOT how the real grown-ups do it!”
And I had a quiet little moment of peace as I realized: of course it is.
Of course the real grown-ups are doing exactly this. They’re frantically trying to balance what they know, what they think they know, what they don’t know — and most frighteningly, what they don’t even know they don’t know — all without dropping the stuff they’re balancing on their hips.
Because we are the real adults. We are the proper grown-ups. 
What we do is, by definition, the way real grown-ups do it. We set our own terms.
This idea really resonates for me. In our living room, you’ll find a matted print of the linked xkcd strip. I gave it to The Fella as a Valentine’s gift last year, because it sums up so much of what I think is successful in our marriage: we make our own life up as we go along, we never forget to play, and we believe in our own decisions more than in the conventional constraints of mainstream society.
Sesame Street‘s “A Sandwich” lets us mingle our celebrations: hurray for the 40th birthday of Sesame Street and for the upcoming Sandwich Party!
I was babysitting my young friend L., who was just on the brink of three years old*. Her parents wanted to spend a grown-up afternoon together, after which we would all gather for dinner. At the end of of the afternoon, L. suggested we get ice cream cones.
“Oh, we’ll have to do that next time, L.,” I said. “We don’t want to spoil our dinners!”
“I don’t mind,” she said, reasonably enough.
“Oh, but your mom** wouldn’t like it, would she?”
She said nothing for a moment, her little face pursed in wry understanding.
Then, suddenly… a light dawned on L.’s face. It was the light of revelation, of a world-altering discovery. It erased those wrinkles of displeasure, smoothing them over with wonder. In the spirit of innovators everywhere, L. had found a solution, a way to keep everyone happy. She bounced on her plump little legs, swept up in the delight and sheer novelty of the idea she was about to share.
Breathless and utterly guileless, she looked up at me and gasped:
“We could… not tell her!“
*I think — this was several years ago, and L. is now in middle school.
** Not to reinforce the all-too-common trope that Mom = responsibility and green beans, Dad = ice cream, ill-advised wackiness, and skateboarding injuries, but in this family… well, yeah.
At a post-Thanksgiving family gathering, my almost-18-year-old niece A and I are watching 3-year-old K play tirelessly with her blanket. K lays the blanket on the floor, lies full-length in it, and rolls herself up like a little burrito. She sits in the center and folds the corners up around her, over her head. Standing, she rolls herself in it head to toe and jumps with all her wobbly might. She lays it out on the floor, climbs onto a chair, and launches herself out into space, landing with a striking thump in the center of her blanket.
I turn to A and say speculatively, “I just want to sit her in the blanket, wrap it up over her, grab it by all four corners, and swing it around over my head.”
A nods sagely and says, in a considering tone, “We learned about that in my psychology class. It’s called giving voice to the id.”
Up at 5:30, thoughts racing through my brain with no particular destination, just visiting the same old subjects of what I should do, what have I read recently, how I wish I was still sleeping. The mini-bar fridge drones on, sucking energy from every life force around it. The fan in the bathroom competes for noisy dominance while JM watches podcasts in there so as not to wake me up. Too late. JM abandons me for the hotel cafe with faster wireless speeds. Instead of staying buried under the covers I decide to write, slow the pace down.
We’re back early from our two week safari. Long story short (meaning I’m not yet allowed to write about it), we turned around after the first day and came back to Alice.
My writing needs to be edited, but that’s the story of my life. Needs editing.
I vividly remember my sanctuary in the lilac tree. It grew in the corner yard of our old house, the house we left shortly after my seventh birthday. Low on the tree where the many branches met there was a small hollow, a recess just the size of a tiny child. I would curl up there warm in the wooden heart of the lilac. The canopy of leaves screened me from view and the fat bumblebees droned and looped around me.
From my little haven, I could peep out sleepily on all the ruckus of our street, the kids whizzing by on their bikes, the high-schoolers jostling past, all elbows and bookbags. The scent of the buds dropped over me like a sweet blanket, and I would drowse and muse for hours, snug in the tree’s embrace.
Memory is so slippery, such a greased weasel soapy little runt, squealing and skittering out of grasp glossy and chimerical beastie, that to ponder it too long invites madness… or philosophy, madness’s respectable cousin. But childhood memories are particularly complicated constructs, deserving of special meditation. Most children find the distinction between the fantastic and the concrete blurry at best, and are already scrambling frantically to make rough sense of most of the realities that cascade around them, much less of the phantasms that flit through their pliant and voracious minds.
But my lilac tree…
A few years ago, I mentioned this peaceful retreat to my oldest sister, and she replied, puzzled, that it couldn’t be so. I can’t remember now: did the lilac tree have no such hollow, or was it simpler still — that there was no lilac tree in that yard? Either way, in a moment I came to realize that one of my fondest memories (and one of the only secrets I had in that big, busy house) was perfectly and flatly untrue, a childhood fantasy.
The second oddest thing about this memory: the instant I told my sister about the lilac hollow, before she even had time to crinkle an eyebrow, I found myself thinking how unlikely it sounded. A hollow in the tree trunk just my size? I crawled into it with no fear of worms or centipedes or bees? No one ever saw me there, or found traces of bark or dirt, or scrapes on my tender little legs? I slept there for hours, and no one looked for me?
The very oddest thing: even as my sweet, fragrant memory disintegrated in the telling, its sweetness remains undiminished. I remember the heady scent, the rough kiss of the bark on my shins, the green of the heart-shaped leaves swimming around me, the dozy bees dipping and humming. I remember the deep peace I felt, cradled there between the branches. It wasn’t real, but it was real.
related: Are my childhood memories real? at Ask Metafilter; when I grow up; the ontology and epistemology of childhood; I, robot.
I am participating in NaBloPoMo.
I don’t know when it happened, but it dates with my earliest memories. The cat, the old gray cat I barely remember, scratched me, and my mother and I both remonstrated in our way. I shook a pudgy finger at him and scolded. “Bad cat!”
Gently my mother corrected me. “He’s not a bad cat. He’s a good cat and we love him, even though he did a bad thing.”
Even at the time, I took a larger message away from that moment. I knew that even when I was bad — even when I squealed and whined, even when I jumped on the bed, even when my sister and I invaded my father’s study (most forbidden in itself) and used his permanent markers to draw all over each other’s limbs and torsos — that my parents would love me.
Not every child knows that. If you hate getting teary-eyed in public, don’t read this in public.
I am participating in NaBloPoMo.
The kid in line at the coffeehouse pulled the sleeve of the rumpled, gray-haired guy standing next to him. “Hey, Dad, I know who this guy is.” He pointed at the packet of Newman’s Own cookies displayed on the counter.
“Yeah?” said his father absently, gazing up at the specials board.
“Yeah! He’s a dentist!”
This caught Dad’s attention, and he looked down at the packet, a smile crinkling his face. “Ah, no, no he’s actually An Actor,” giving the last two words a storybook emphasis. Dad’s eye flickered toward me and he gave me the special “ain’t kids crazy?” raised eyebrow.
It was time to chip in. “Actually, he’s right, in a way… The model for the original painting was Grant Wood’s dentist.”
The father turned wide eyes on his son, and a new look dawned on his face. “Hey… how did you know that?” he breathed softly.
The kid shrugged. “I dunno. I know things.”
Yeah.
I am participating in NaBloPoMo.
I’m shamelessly stealing Alice’s charming idea for a post, Things I thought I would do as a grown-up, when I was seven.
1. Throw dinner parties. Instructed by my parents’ frequent evening entertainments, I assumed that all grown-ups had regular dinner parties, complete with cocktail hours around bowls of salted nuts and stiff drinks on the the rocks, followed by a sit-down dinner centered around a rich casserole and possibly a bottle of Cold Duck. (Since Cold Duck was the only wine I was allowed to sample, I thought all wines were Cold Duck.) Of course, as I imagined this scene in my future, my own children would slip from their beds and sit, feet dangling through the staircase banisters, to eavesdrop on the incomprehensible conversation punctuated by bursts of raucous laughter.
2. Wear suits. Stretchy, colorful, double-knit polyester suits, with flared skirts and and fitted jackets and oversized buttons.
3. Wear high heels. Ha!
4. Own a fur coat. Hey, it was the seventies. Even my Barbie had a fur coat.
5. Grow my hair long and, on formal occasions, wear it tucked in a bun accented with a single flower. This appears to be my only sartorial expectation not gleaned from my Barbie’s wardrobe. Perhaps I saw one too many photos of 1970s brides.
6. Work as a cocktail waitress, and teach in a high school. Though I dreamed of earning a living as a mystery writer and worked diligently on my stories, even then I knew I’d need a day job. My father was a teacher, and we lived in faculty housing, so most of the adults I knew were, indeed, high school teachers. I cannot explain where the cocktailing career sprang from.
By the time I was eight, my ambitions had shifted: I was going to become a primatologist. Long-time readers will recall that, at four or so, I expected to become the Pope.
7. Stay up all night whenever I wanted, and occasionally have ice cream for dinner. This has proven to be true.
Elli
Elsa
