Catherine Egan's Blog - Posts Tagged "growing-up"
We are not who we were
Dear Blog,
One of my favourite people, a girl I’ll call L., was recently distraught about turning four. She was afraid of getting older because when she grew up she would not live with her family anymore. Her mother told her that she would never have to leave, but understanding as well as a four-year-old can the totality of the changes coming, L. burst into tears and said, “but I will.” And she’s right.
I remember feeling the exact same way when I turned five, and expressing the same fear to my mother, of growing up and having to function in the mysterious adult world with nobody to take care of me. She tried to reassure me: "You'll want to leave one day," she told me. But that was even more frightening, and got to the real heart of the issue: One day, you will want the opposite of what you want now. One day you will be so changed as to be unrecognizable to yourself now - what you love most and fear most and want most, so much of who you are, will fall by the wayside, forgotten. In other words: You are facing the obliteration of your essential self. No wonder Peter Pan is so appealing.
The final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner begins:
Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last.
This is the chapter that makes grownups cry, because the children we are reading to will not be who they are much longer, and we too are not who we were. Christopher Robin takes Pooh Bear up to the Enchanted Wood, talks about the pleasure of doing Nothing, and other things, then knights him. Then he confesses to Pooh the awful, unavoidable truth:
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don't let you."
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.
"Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully.
"Pooh, when I'm - you know - when I'm not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?"
"Just me?"
"Yes, Pooh."
"Will you be here too?"
"Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh."
"That's good," says Pooh.
But Christopher Robin is not being entirely candid there, and knows it. A moment later:
"Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnestly, "if I - if I'm not quite - " he stopped and tried again - "Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?"
But Winnie-the-Pooh can't understand it and Christopher Robin can't explain it.
While the chapter is partly nostalgia, for the lazy hours of Doing Nothing that children often make better use of than adults (the existence of facebook is alone proof that adults too have the time and desire to do nothing, they just aren't very good at it), what makes me choke up when I read it to my son is that Christopher Robin is facing the loss of everything he has cared about and all he has been until now. It's not that "They Won't Let Him" do nothing, it's that he won't want to, at least not in the same way, because he's going to become somebody different: an older child, an adolescent, and unimaginably but inevitably, a grownup. The Hundred Acre Wood will be forgotten then, and Pooh just an old stuffed bear. It can feel like such a deep and terrible betrayal of who you were, to let go and move on. To stop believing in Santa Claus, say. To stop loving what you loved.
This weekend a blizzard dumped 34 inches of snow on our city overnight. My boys are so young they will probably not remember this incredible snowfall, flailing and falling and being pulled back out of the deep drifts, holding on to each other on the sled while we lugged them through the transformed world of buried car-shapes and thigh-deep powder, how everybody was just out in the snow-filled streets marveling at it and grinning at each other, and the whiteness of it was so bright that when we went back inside it seemed much too dark for a while. They won't remember how we changed into dry things, put on some music, had lunch, and did nothing for a while, each in our own way. I don't know in what way these snowy days will become a part of them, or the exact ratio of joy to terror when falling into snow drifts as deep as you are tall, how sure they are of the arms that catch them and pull them out each time. Later on we went to a friend's house, where the kids had hot chocolate and the adults had sherry. By the time we left in the dark, a digger and a snowplow had been through and left a swathe of compacted snow down the middle of the road, like a tunnel. So I put the boys in the sled and ran home with them, the snow piled high on either side of us.
Who we are each day becomes, the next day, just part of the bridge to who we are next - and maybe in the end it really is a bridge to nowhere - but running through this tunnel in the road, through the dark and the snow, with the boys clinging to each other on the sled and screaming and laughing, the giddy, impossible joy I feel is like a thread connecting me to all my former selves. OK, maybe it’s the sherry, but I don’t really think so. Sometimes it seems there is so little of one’s early self that survives the fires of growing up, but at this moment I could be in Narnia, and I would not be so surprised to see a faun by the streetlamp over there.
Blizzardly boozily yours,
Catherine
One of my favourite people, a girl I’ll call L., was recently distraught about turning four. She was afraid of getting older because when she grew up she would not live with her family anymore. Her mother told her that she would never have to leave, but understanding as well as a four-year-old can the totality of the changes coming, L. burst into tears and said, “but I will.” And she’s right.
I remember feeling the exact same way when I turned five, and expressing the same fear to my mother, of growing up and having to function in the mysterious adult world with nobody to take care of me. She tried to reassure me: "You'll want to leave one day," she told me. But that was even more frightening, and got to the real heart of the issue: One day, you will want the opposite of what you want now. One day you will be so changed as to be unrecognizable to yourself now - what you love most and fear most and want most, so much of who you are, will fall by the wayside, forgotten. In other words: You are facing the obliteration of your essential self. No wonder Peter Pan is so appealing.
The final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner begins:
Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last.
This is the chapter that makes grownups cry, because the children we are reading to will not be who they are much longer, and we too are not who we were. Christopher Robin takes Pooh Bear up to the Enchanted Wood, talks about the pleasure of doing Nothing, and other things, then knights him. Then he confesses to Pooh the awful, unavoidable truth:
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don't let you."
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.
"Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully.
"Pooh, when I'm - you know - when I'm not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?"
"Just me?"
"Yes, Pooh."
"Will you be here too?"
"Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh."
"That's good," says Pooh.
But Christopher Robin is not being entirely candid there, and knows it. A moment later:
"Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnestly, "if I - if I'm not quite - " he stopped and tried again - "Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?"
But Winnie-the-Pooh can't understand it and Christopher Robin can't explain it.
While the chapter is partly nostalgia, for the lazy hours of Doing Nothing that children often make better use of than adults (the existence of facebook is alone proof that adults too have the time and desire to do nothing, they just aren't very good at it), what makes me choke up when I read it to my son is that Christopher Robin is facing the loss of everything he has cared about and all he has been until now. It's not that "They Won't Let Him" do nothing, it's that he won't want to, at least not in the same way, because he's going to become somebody different: an older child, an adolescent, and unimaginably but inevitably, a grownup. The Hundred Acre Wood will be forgotten then, and Pooh just an old stuffed bear. It can feel like such a deep and terrible betrayal of who you were, to let go and move on. To stop believing in Santa Claus, say. To stop loving what you loved.
This weekend a blizzard dumped 34 inches of snow on our city overnight. My boys are so young they will probably not remember this incredible snowfall, flailing and falling and being pulled back out of the deep drifts, holding on to each other on the sled while we lugged them through the transformed world of buried car-shapes and thigh-deep powder, how everybody was just out in the snow-filled streets marveling at it and grinning at each other, and the whiteness of it was so bright that when we went back inside it seemed much too dark for a while. They won't remember how we changed into dry things, put on some music, had lunch, and did nothing for a while, each in our own way. I don't know in what way these snowy days will become a part of them, or the exact ratio of joy to terror when falling into snow drifts as deep as you are tall, how sure they are of the arms that catch them and pull them out each time. Later on we went to a friend's house, where the kids had hot chocolate and the adults had sherry. By the time we left in the dark, a digger and a snowplow had been through and left a swathe of compacted snow down the middle of the road, like a tunnel. So I put the boys in the sled and ran home with them, the snow piled high on either side of us.
Who we are each day becomes, the next day, just part of the bridge to who we are next - and maybe in the end it really is a bridge to nowhere - but running through this tunnel in the road, through the dark and the snow, with the boys clinging to each other on the sled and screaming and laughing, the giddy, impossible joy I feel is like a thread connecting me to all my former selves. OK, maybe it’s the sherry, but I don’t really think so. Sometimes it seems there is so little of one’s early self that survives the fires of growing up, but at this moment I could be in Narnia, and I would not be so surprised to see a faun by the streetlamp over there.
Blizzardly boozily yours,
Catherine
