My Childhood Isn't Over...

...And It Never Will Be

I was rather worried a week or so ago because Daddy Bunny was mad at me. Not so much because he was mad at me, but concerned that he could be mad at me. He is, after all, filled with stuffing, a little less than he used to be, and at this point, composed mostly of scraps.

But someone said something to me. 'It makes perfect sense,' he says. I was telling him about my family. 'Our house, I mean Mommy and Daddy's house,' I'd said, sadly remembering I don't actually live there anymore, 'is fun.' Everyone's a big kid in some way or another. Daddy still throws temper-tantrums occasionally (though much less since he's been on that blood pressure medication) and Mommy still plays games. It's a place where you can laugh at yourself, where you can get chased and tackled for trying to save the Christmas cookies from other people's mouths, where even doing grown-up things feels like you're just playing grown-up.

Sewing with Mommy at 26 feels like sewing with Mommy at 14. Except, my seams are a little straighter and the clothes usually fit when I'm done (and I get to drink the wine, too.) Singing songs with Daddy at the breakfast table could be yesterday or 20 years ago. Probably the same songs. Our snowmen have gone from piles of roundish globs with a carrot and charcoal to full-out sculptures of Wendy. Our pianistic endeavors have moved from singing into egg-beater microphones with a keyboard demo to playing November Rain. But we're still playing; we're having fun; it's something we want to do; it's not something we have to do.

So, he says, 'it makes sense.' Children play. They play with all their energy, all their emotions. It's powerful. It's real. And, it's magical. Everything cat be alive. Adults forget how to play. They lose the magic. Things are things and people, even they are things sometimes, too.

I think about our house. I think about how we play. And I think he's right. I think about Katrina consoling Gibby after he somehow winds up in the clothes chute. About how Mommy tells Daddy he's being cruel when he snaps in half the army man he just found in his sock drawer before throwing him away. (Though her comment may be more in regards to my feelings.) About how when someone is trying to force something, I'll hear 'you're hurting it' as much as 'you're breaking it'. How old things aren't 'broken', they're 'dead'.

Children play. All their emotions put full force into everything they do. So is that our choice? Take control of emotions, hide them, push them down, become an adult, forget how to play? I want to play. I want to feel. Raw emotions are difficult; they are powerful, but that's how we know we're alive. I want to know I'm alive.

I want to feel life. I want to enjoy what I'm doing. I want to play law student when I have reading, play dress-up when I have interviews, play house-wife when I have laundry or dishes. I want to play because then it's real.

And, I think, at least some of the time, Mommy, Daddy, Wendy and Katrina are right there with me. Heck, Wendy probably the most; she's been playing paleontologist since she was about six!

This is still my childhood and it's not going anywhere.

(Original Post)

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