Are You Ever Going to Grow Up?

Since writing the post "The Christmas-Crazy Kid," I've had the sense that something was missing.  I wasn't sure what it was, but my regret that I might lose the childlike wonder that made me who I am sliced into me.  I literally felt like I was dying; I couldn't breathe. I needed help reviving my "inner child" or maybe my outer child.

First thing the next morning, I emailed my former dance partner, the one who sang carols and loved decorating the tree and asked him if he would help me recover the child in me.  The jury is still out on the answer, but just saying that to lose my child was to die was an important admission.

Sometime this evening, I recalled having been asked by someone when I was well into my adulthood, "Aren't you ever going to grow up?" as I was being playful and crazy.  "Oh, my Lord!" I said, aghast at the possibility, "I hope not!"  I couldn't possibly imagine why anyone, and most especially me, would want to "grow up."

Maybe the problem is and always has been that it took me well into my adulthood to become a child. Although it may seem a natural thing for a child to be, being a child wasn't for me.  Born into a family of very responsible people, I was terribly adult and responsible long before starting school.  My parents grew up with the poverty and responsibility so I suspect that they were never children either.  And, it was passed down. 

Many think that childhood is related to the years one has lived.  I don't think that is so. I think childhood is an inner state, and I am certain that it comes from the heart. Having done so myself, I am certain that we can fall in and out of childhood.

I can't really say when I learned to be a child.  I do know that between my terribly responsible freshman year in college when I had a very high grade point average but absolutely no fun and the end of my sophomore year when I had way too much fun something shifted in me.  But, that wasn't when I found the child in me.  Being a  child connotes an innocence, and that was just a wild and crazy year. 

Yet, even though it was just wild and crazy, that transition allowed me to shed the mantle of over-responsibility.  I've never really stopped being responsible for myself, but at least from time to time, I'd like to think that I have given up being responsible for the whole world.  I would like to think that, but most of the time, I think that just isn't so.  I do worry terribly about the ills of our world from war and poverty to global warming.

I find that I wrestle with understanding what it means to be a child since I am sure I wasn't one when I was young and am not sure when I became one.  Although I am not sure it makes sense, what comes to me is that being a child has more to do with tuning in to who I am and letting go of expectations of others.  A fundamental part of who I am is worrying about the ills of our world, and I think I did that from a very young age. 

I googled "What does it mean to be a child?" and I thank barbaracdf on Yahoo Answers for her thought that "...being a child at heart is being sweet, true, say what's on your mind in a cute way, and most....very loving!!!"*  Her thought captures the essence I'd been searching for and what took me so long to find.  Being true.  Saying what's on my mind in a cute and unabrasive way. Without the innocence of my child, saying what's on my mind can be abrasive.  Being loving.  Add to that playfulness, and I think we've got it. 

But, perhaps the most poignant part of barbaracdf's comment is about "being loving." I don't think when I was a child that I knew what it was to be loving, because I hadn't experienced loving much.  When I experienced lovingness, I found my child.  I found the safety to be playful...and I was. 

That is probably what I captured sometime in my thirties when I think I finally found my child.  I found what it meant to be true to me, to be playful, to experience humor, and to laugh.  And, no, I don't ever want to grow up and lose those things. 




*https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100422093017AAlG5mR