Growing up is hard, as many people often notice. For example, after one is grown, there is less fun, more work, and less free time. When most people become old, they reminisce their younger days when their joints didn’t hurt and they had time for fun and they didn’t know swear words.
But when most people are young, they cannot wait to become old. When they are old, they can have jobs, they can change the world, they can be tall. They wait in anticipation for the days when they are the firefighters rescuing cats, the police fighting bad guys and saving the cities, or the famous singers whose names everyone recognizes.
I was the oddball of the group. I wanted to stay young forever and I dreaded growing up. (I did want to be taller, though. But not too tall. I was terrified of how the banisters on stairwells would then be shorter.)
But one cannot help but grow up as it is in one’s DNA. However, even if you were to stay in a kindergartener’s body forever, you would still grow in experience. (Would it be acceptable to relate one’s age to the number of swear words they know?)
A negative side effect of growing up, besides banisters being shorter, is the loss of magic. I love fantasy books now, but I didn’t when I was younger. Maybe this love of fantasy is like a vitamin supplement to make up for the lack of magic in the real world.
When one is young, one believes in a whole variety of magical beings and one puts absolute faith in their existence. Such magical beings could include (but are not limited to) leprechauns, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, other fairies, cats, gnomes, elves, Santa’s elves, Keebler elves, etc.
The uncertain existence of these magical beings brought a sense of excitement to otherwise mundane kindergarten life. I say uncertain for two reasons A) you never see them, even though you know they exist and B) the doubters out there always said you are wrong, even though you know deep down that it was they that were wrong.
When I lost my first tooth and I put it underneath my pillow, ecstatic for the soon-to-arrive tooth fairy’s arrival, the tooth fairy forgot my house. Predictably, I was quite upset that morning. I couldn’t believe that the tooth fairy had forgotten me.
My parental units sat me, the five-year-old without front teeth, down and told me that the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and leprechauns and other fairies and Keebler elves were all lies. They were stories and they were fake. This shattered my little heart. I don’t remember my reaction, but it was probably along the lines of screaming and/or crying.
But, of course, I wasn’t crying because I had discovered that Earth was populated solely by human beings (among plants, animals, and microscopic life, of course) instead of being inhabited by mythical all-powerful beings as well. I was crying because my parents had lied to me.
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