Child Reflection

Being an adult is overrated. I’ve posted my grievances on social media, but only a few cares and shares. I was fifteen years old when I first started hashing out a plan to move out. I wanted to break free from the prison my strict mother reigned over. No sleepovers! No play dates! No boyfriends! No parties at home, and no parties I was allowed to go to. “I hate here;” I mumbled under my breath often growing up. I was always required to come straight home from school until junior high. My sister and I were primarily independent and responsible for our selves going and coming home from school. If we missed the school bus, we caught public transits. We didn’t talk to strangers, only answered calls with known names on the caller ID and didn’t open the door for anybody.

Why? My mother worked the graveyard shift five to seven days a week. My mother made sure family, close neighbors and her church family looked after us since she couldn’t always afford childcare. However, I was the oldest of three children with a single mother. That being said, I was forced to grow up quickly. I was required to be home by 8 p.m., so my mom could promptly clock in at 9 p.m. At the end of my sophomore year, I started working a summer job to help her pay some bills. Looking back it now my mother, doing the best she could to maintain, should have been an omen of how adulthood would be for me.

Now, I wonder where did all the hype come from? Having responsibilities like caregiving, bills and the ability to pay those bills isn’t fun or easy. Maybe, my mom made it look easy, I thought. When I was younger, adulthood was synonymous with freedom and the ability to do what I wanted when I wanted. All lies! As a child, you can get into a small fight. If no one is hurt or injured, you’re yelled at and grounded for a month with no phone.

As an adult, a small fight grows into a major altercation or a straight-out brawl in a bar or nightclub. Typically, it ends in jail time, a fine and a record that stays with you every time you try to find a well-paying job with benefits. As a child, you mope and pout when you can’t get your favorite candy while grocery shopping with your parents. Then, you try stealing it. If your mother catches you, you spend the day either staring at wall or with the right cheek of your derrière sore. If you get away with it, you indulge in your small victory with no consequence. As an adult, you think of candy, you catch diabetes. If you get caught stealing, you realize prison is prison.

Like my mother, I have three children. However, fate and karma had a meeting after I snuck out the house a couple of times in high school. With no sympathy, they destined and blessed me with three smart and sassy beautiful girls. Lyric is my oldest. Recently, she had a book assignment, but her reading comprehension is like every Gen-Z child in the world. It’s lost in the matrix of tablets and phones. This was her second book talk presentation in the fifth grade.

Each time, I read the book that she picked to present from cover to cover on my own after she read it. Once I finished reading, I had her present what she read to me to see how she interpreted the book. Both times she could barely tell me the theme, plot, important details and gave me a very broad description of what she read. From cover to cover, the last book took me only three hours to read. I would have been done sooner, but I kept being interrupted with mom like stuff to do like cooking and giving her younger sisters a bath.

Anyways, she asked me how was I able to read the book so quickly. This was the second time she read this book, and each time, it took her about two weeks. It was in that moment, I saw my childhood self in her. Even though she looks and acts like me, the key difference between us was circumstantial. As a child, my mother and father were always at odds. My mother supported three children on a minimum wage, and when need be, multiple jobs.

When I wanted something or wished I could go somewhere. I found what I wanted in different places in books. I was real-life Matilda as a child except without the telekinetic powers. My imagination is the one childlike quality I cherish most. I dreamt in color and could see things visually nobody else could see. My mother felt I had psychic abilities because of how clairvoyant I became from reading and learning.

On the other hand, I had a unique ability to feel someone else’s joy and pain. This was my secret power. I read so much that I began to talk too much. When my mother and father would try to silence me, I wrote. Then the writing transformed into song and dance, then the songs manifested into still life and figures on canvas. I painted what I felt or what I felt for someone else.

Now, I’m a mom with so many responsibilities. The dreams are no longer in color if I can remember them at all. I don’t throw my body around like a ballerina anymore like my middle daughter, Kami, does when she hears music. I don’t sing like my youngest Jaz does in falsetto, so the nightingale in the letters Levi wrote could sing right along in the book we read. I was Darcy, the character Elvira Woodruff painted in her novel about a child that wasn’t allowed to be a child. She was forced to grow up quickly due to the time and circumstances she was born into.

As an adult, I can admit I’ve lost myself in my children because I want them to enjoy real freedom for as long as they can. When you are a child, they never tell you how truly free you are: free to fail, free to imagine, free of deadlines, free of financial obligations, free of responsibilities and free to believe you can be anything and anywhere. The possibilities are endless until you are either forced to grow up too soon or you leave the comfortable nest your parents built to protect you.

To answer Lyric, I grabbed a piece of Hershey’s Cookies and Cream bar. I looked Lyric in the eye and took a bite. My mouth was full, but I mumbled; “I read fast because I read a lot. Reading helps you to be creative. You should read more.” I started singing and dancing around the kitchen where seeing paper, a mini canvas, paint and paintbrushes brought me joy. Lyric and her sisters explore that fun imagination they’ve all inherited from their mother, and oh, their singing and dancing daddy too. Being an adult is overrated, but everything I do is for my babies. So, It’s not all bad. This must have been how my mom felt.