“Mom, am I too old for _______________?”
This from Will, who is an appalling eleven years old. We are headed out to school, but he has recently been looking at a toy catalogue and circling items. He has toys like these already, and lately he and Everett have been playing with them together. They have, in fact, been spending hours with them.
“I’m wondering if I shouldn’t like them anymore,” he says. “Should I stop playing with them now?”
A few weeks before I turned twelve, I began to pray that Jesus would come back. I wanted Nothing At All To Do with growing up. Somehow I had an inkling of what was around the bend: puberty, maybe, and awkwardness, and being something and someone I had no interest in or understanding of. I thought having Jesus come back before I turned twelve sounded like Good Timing.
Of course, since then I’ve been glad to have grown up. Of my last three decades, this most recent one has easily been the best. I love being a wife, a mother, a teacher, a (sometime) writer, a (recent) adult student. Growing up has been good for me.
But I don’t regret, either, my reluctance to head this way, to accept the inevitable. I have friends who say that they couldn’t wait to grow up, that all they wanted was to be an adult, that when they were children, they played at being grown-ups all the time. I have a daughter who is, much of the time, Just Like That. But I readily confess to having a bit of that Peter Pan in me: it was, for the most part, Good to be a child.
“Will,” I tell my boy, the one who doesn’t know whether or not he should enjoy his toys, “don’t give it another thought it if you can help it. The toys you like are great ones; you like them with good reason. And one day you won’t like them as much. And one day you won’t like them at all. Don’t waste these days of liking them with worry that you shouldn’t.”
That reasoning seems to satisfy him. I hope it does.
I remember a line from one of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, a brief description of a stream that runs through the Hundred Acre Wood. It goes on, Milne tells us, in a meandering sort of way, wandering slowly through the wood on its way to the sea. But it is in no hurry. After all, it says to itself, “we shall get there someday.”
