My youngest daughter and I have been reading Charlotte's Web together as of late, in anticipation of seeing the movie soon. Tonight, as we neared the ending, I suddenly became overcome with emotion for no apparent reason. After we finished the chapter and I tucked her into bed, I continued crying.
I was having a flashback, I soon realized, back to the time when I was a little girl and reading Charlotte's Web for the first time. It was a happy time in my life, and books fed me and my imagination all throughout my childhood. All of those characters lived for me and in me, leaping off the pages and into my bedroom. All of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, with Laura and her beloved dog Jack, Charlotte's Web with Wilbur, Fern, and Charlotte, Stuart Little, The Cricket in Times Square, Nancy Drew; I devoured them all. Every summer I would join the summer reading club and read more books than any other kid.
"So why all the tears?" I asked myself. Because life was simpler then. Better. Easier. Our parents did all the worrying about big people stuff. Our only job was to be kids and read books and watch Mork and Mindy and Happy Days on TV and ride our bikes in the summertime over at the schoolyard until it was too dark to see and swim at the pool all day until we were as tanned as butter beans and come home and fall into bed.
I grew up in a neighborhood of all boys; there wasn't another girl besides me to be found for blocks (it must have been something in the water, I don't know; that's just how it worked out). I became the consumate tomboy. There wasn't a boy around who could climb trees, run, ride bikes, or play football better than me. I prided myself on "anything you can do, I can do better". (This was also, I now know, the foundation for all of my future conflicts with "The Man");). My brothers and I were close and would spend endless hours playing electronic football (you remember the one, the men would "run" on the vibrating field, going in all directions - woo hoo! Now THAT you couldn't beat with a stick on a Saturday night!) and laying on the family room floor on Saturday mornings watching cartoons in our pajamas and drawing our own, along with the dream house we were gonna live in someday, complete with domed flying cars in the garage.
Yeah, that makes me sad. Knowing I can never go back to those days, knowing I can never have a "do-over", knowing that now I have to be the grown up to my own kids in an era unfathomable to me when I was a kid. I get to explain "inconvenient truths" to them, terrorism, loss of animal habitat, war, child predators, custody battles, and my favorite, "Why Certain Parents Are Assholes Unfit To Wipe Their Own Asses, Much Less Be Parents", or WCPAAUTWTOAMLBP for short. Ah yes, the wonders of being a parent. This is the dirty work we are relegated to. Some days I would trade it all for one more hot, humid, Ohio summer night, playing hide and seek and calling, "olly olly oxen free". Being seven and having no conceivable thought of what all was to come in my adult life.
My adult life. The life I seemingly woke up to one day and realized that my parents are old and won't be around much longer. I don't call them enough and my dad and I's relationship is in the toilet because we're both too stubborn to say we're sorry. The life where I realized that my brothers don't keep in contact with me anymore and maybe we weren't really as close a family as I must have imagined we were back then. The life where true friends are few, money is always tight, the relationship is never where I want it to be, and like Roseanne Rosannadanna's grandfather used to say, "It's always something".
But then again, I DID finally end up with an incredible dog named Jack like I always wanted, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I DID end up with the two most beautiful children in the world, and I DID end up living in Colorado like I always wanted, surrounded by beauty unsurpassed anywhere else. Who needs a do-over anyway?
(*This blog was written in honor of Tonya Yvonne Paige Sarver, a great woman I never knew. May she and her brother remain Forever Young in his heart)
