When you’re a kid
Parents love to give you advice using the lessons they’ve learned through time, when you’re a kid.
School kids pick on you because you are different. Your skin and your eyes and your nose look different. They ask, “What are you?” and you don’t know what to say. Jokes about your name and your looks slowly erode you, until you’re nothing but a puddle of tears flung over your mom’s lap. She says, “none of this will matter when you’re older” and you don’t believe anything could be more painful than this. The advice doesn’t make sense, when you’re a kid.
In elementary school, you ride the bus with some of the older kids. Idolizing them and wishing you could be just a little bit older so you could be cool, too. You just know they have it all figured out.
Anytime you go shopping, you beg your mom for shoes like theirs or clothes like theirs, accessories you’ve seen them wear. She says, “you’re too young for that, maybe when you’re older” and you cry because “life’s not fair” and “why can’t I be older now”. As your head rests in her lap, she tells you “don’t rush to grow up,” and you don’t understand why, when you’re a kid.
In middle school, you have your first real crush and suddenly you care even more about how you look, comparing your body to those of your peers. The girls with boyfriends look so happy, they’re so mature. You think you want what they have. But as your crush unfolds the paper football note, you can’t look away as they toss it in the trash without a second thought.
The weight of your first heartbreak sits on your chest like a boulder. Made nervous by their suddenly taciturn preteen, your parents ask questions to pick and prod and understand what happened. When they find you sobbing to “here without you”, they say “You will like and love many others, don’t worry, it’s okay.” But you know that they’re wrong, when you’re a kid.
In high school, you practically live with your friends. You’re glued at the hip. When it comes time to visit your mom’s family, you drag your feet. “Why do we have to go again, we just saw them a few months ago,” you slam doors and stomp around the house. Until your mom loses her patience and looks at you teary eyed and wordless, because she just found out her brother died. And you think you understand when you’re a kid.
During the Summer of your junior year in college, you don’t move back home for the first time and you’re excited. All the things you miss in the city when you’re home lay before you like fresh opportunities. You’ll miss your hometown friends but promise to hangout soon. You wait until the last minute to tell your parents because you know they’ll be disappointed, even if they try to hide it.
You are correct but being right doesn’t feel great, so you push the feeling away. When your parents call, you don’t always answer and when you do, they say, “there’s nothing more precious than time, we just want to see you.” You shrug and make loose plans you don’t intend to keep, and you think you’ll have plenty of time, when you’re a kid.
Until one day you find, ten years have got behind you. Life is short and years are shorter, and you wish you could go back to when you were a kid.
————— Written with inspiration from the lyrics below ——
“Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day. You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown. Waiting for something or someone to show you the way.
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain. You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking and racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older. Shorter of breath, one day closer to death.
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines. Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
The time is gone, the song is over. Thought I’d something more to say.”
