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The day of my eighth birthday was devastating to me. I had thought that I could stay 7 years old forever, because 7 was my favorite number, and therefore the best, only to find out that I had indeed turned eight. Against my will I might add!
Most kids were in a hurry to grow up, but I was in a hurry to stay little.
Eventually this passed and I began to look forward to the exciting milestone ages just like all the rest of the kids in the universe who wish their lives away. Sadly, we continue to wish for accelerated aging even though all the adults tell us that "these are the best days of your life so enjoy them". Instead we can't wait to turn 16 to get our driver's license or turn 18 so we can leave high school and go to college or turn 21 to drink...for the very first time ever in our lives because we would never sneak away to a party while we were under age. That would be asinine and stupid and a rite of passage that most every kid usually ignores completely.
Then one day we wake up with a mortgage, a soul sucking 40 hour a week job, 2.5 kids and a vague memory of where the last decade went. It's postmarked with pregnancies and promotions and teething and kindergarten....at least you think. It all seems like one fuzzy, blurry blob of time that passed in a heartbeat.
Which shows you that they lied when they said that time flies when you're having fun. Turns out it flies even when you're doing the 9 to 5 grind and barely making it through your weekly schedule with sanity intact. It speeds by, doing 90 in a 65, while you're trying to slow down and enjoy your children's childhoods and family vacations and Christmas mornings. One minute it's New Year's Day and then you blink and it's Halloween.
If that wasn't enough, there are all the other lies that they fed us when we were growing up. I have not spontaneously combusted once in all of my forty odd years. I mean, yeah, that's a good thing. But the number of times that they drilled "Stop, drop and roll" really made me think that it was much easier to catch fire without warning.
They also said that sitting too close to the television would ruin our eyes. Well the joke's on them because I runed my eyes by reading. Sure, the dim lighting probably had more to do with that than the reading, but it wasn't from watching tv, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it! Turns out you can ruin your eyes in more ways than one. (There's also more than one way to skin a cat which frankly, who was the weirdo that figured THAT out?)
Not to mention that the closest that I have ever come to quicksand is some really sticky mud. Even then it wasn't really that hard to get out of. Between the spontaneous combustion and myriad quicksand pools we were sure to encounter, childhood was rife with tension and potential trauma.
One of the worst ones though is "Knowledge is power". Um, excuse me. If you have anxiety and a strong tendency to overthink everything, knowledge can be frightening. I once read an article that said the average person swallows 10 spiders in their sleep over the course of their lifetime. What do I do with that information? Except panic sweep the bedroom for stray arachnids every night? There are some things that we really don't need to know. Sometimes "Knowledge is terrifying."
Given all of this, it really makes you wonder if a stitch in time really does save nine or if Rome WAS really built in a day. I mean, can we trust anything that they told us? Hold on, I think I have a pretty tinfoil hat somewhere around here somewhere....
I guess the moral of the story is to eat the cake because a good things come to those who wait unless its dessert, which is not what "better late than never" is about. If you wait too long to get cake, you've put all your eggs into one basket and the early bird ended up getting the worm. (Which is really gross considering cake was an option.)
Need more mayhem? Feel free to read past articles going all the way back to the early days of 2013!
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