22: When Life was Never a Current Event

CHAPTER 22

When Life Was Never
A Current Event

As said, mom was not mom she was Ashley and I was whoever I needed to be at any particular time. While this might have been a prime breeding bed for an identity crisis, it created more freedom.

A sign to never get trapped in categories, except as a rebel to categories.

One valuable asset that emerged from this freedom was the insight that circumstance forced me to see regarding the foolish importance society accords age. My life led me to know: we are what we are exclusive of our weight, bank account …and age.

Even today if asked how old I am, my thoughts are: Why do you want to know how old my body is? What's the point other than nosiness? You'll change the number anyway to accommodate what you want to believe so as to fit me into the category you want me in. So, why bother?

Therefore, depending on my mood, I give my shoe size or IQ, then walk away and let others take it from there.

When I was surging through my kidhood show biz fizzies, I learned the art of being whatever age got me the job. All us kids learned that Rule of Numb. The standard reply to “How old are you?” was “Between . . .” As in: Between 7 and 10. Or my handiest reply: “How old do you want me to be, Mr. Director?”

Flexible fudging came with the territory.

It was a safe twist on the numbers racket. For me, the prize was cutting off one more Traditional Limitation society seeks to harness onto our thinking: Digital Living.

My vow to never sign up for the Age Game most likely manifested through the obligations I carried and the kismet I was cast into. My position in life was so utterly ambiguous. I never saw myself as any specific age, which was re-enforced by never having an admitted age pinned on me by Ashley or my agents.

Official birthday parties never existed, and while this may seem like a ritual downer, it wasn't. How could I have felt denied when I didn't know the experience? As in: How can you feel denied of Oreos or sweet potato pie if you never tasted those treats?

I was oblivious to the common custom of living life based on numbers. Ergo! I lived without digital definitions.

It encouraged me to base my lifal milestones upon my accomplishments and meaningful moments, rather than on the Traditional Leapfrog Game of striving toward a defined rung on the Number Ladder. This also canceled any dread of approaching the upper wrung outs like the Big Four-Oh! Ergo! Insuring that I would never be booked passage on an Over the Hill Junket.

When I was 11, it never occurred that I couldn't buy and cook a lobster dinner from scratch or tackle any creative project.

Therefore, as an adult it never occurred to me that I can't still bee-bop through the tulips.

I once heard a terrific inquiry: “If you didn't know how old you are, how old would you feel you are?” Indicating, Digital Amnesia may have terrific side affects.

With the age question, whatever answer pops out sure validates the importance of our attitude. Suggesting, we can accomplish whatever we desire at any age, given the right inner jazzing. The only limits we have are those imposed on us by our Fear Fleas or by Social Tradition.

When we're free of those Nags of Tradition, anything is possible, from becoming computer whizzes to entertaining millions as George Burns did until his 100^th birthday.

As he profoundly conveyed: “I can't die, I'm booked!”

To age, I say: I can do anything, I'm alive!

There was a time when I was totally baffled when people suggested I lost my kidhood due to my early duty trail. Lost it? Heck! I'm still in it. Actually, now more than ever. In fact, I feel I've lived past-backwards in that I had greater burdens than I do now. Time has simply made life funner.

Besides, what is a normal kidhood outside of how we fantasize it? How sitcoms want us to believe? To most of us, kidhood is exactly what we had, or didn't have, and may feel cheated from.

It was either a Wow! or a Bow-Wow!

Sure, my kidhood was crazy. But in reality, whose life has not detoured off TV fiction? To date, I haven't been in one home underscored with a laughtrack or Mancini music. Indicating that dis-functional may be more common than functional.

Then, all experience serves benefits when one accepts the Greater Setup of return reincarnational visits, and that all setups are pre-planned for our individual and collective growth.

Ergo! All setups and experiences are functional on the spiritual level as needed for our soular evolution.

When I hear “lost your childhood”, my brain flips into asking: No! You're kidding. I LOST it? When? Hey! Maybe if you tell me what it looked like I can figure out where it went. When I dropped it. OK?

Recently, as I looked through a reality lens, a mammoth question came to focus: What the heck is kidhood? A stage of learning and growth? Or a junket of irresponsibility?

TRUTH IS: I had a kidhood. We all did. And there are as many versions of kidhood as there are kids to live them. Even in the same family, each member lives their personal separate interpretation.

As there's always been kids blessed with opportunity and overt love, there's always been kids laden with hostility, drudgery, limitation and seemingly unfair hardships. Child Labor Laws were not initiated without cause.

Sure, there are many wonderful home settings, but there are also countless kids trapped in lives way off the beaten fact of how society imagines kidhood ought to be.

Heck! Even the kids in fairytales had it rough. Hansel & Gretel, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Heidi and the rest. To me, none of them had kidhoods worth trading bubble gum cards for.

Reality illustrates that there are kids burdened with the responsibility of rearing younger siblings; for earning early wages to supplement family incomes.

There are global kids maturing under the siege of war and desolate deprivation. Kids repressed from their potential by domineering Pop & Momarchs; left to stagnate in emotional squalor. Kids now, even in America the Beautiful, who are becoming significant factors within our escalating hungry and homeless population.

There are kids dwelling behind composed wealthy facades that society interprets as privileged, who are fed greater servings of emotional neglect than we want to believe. Kids who are stunted from seeking help due to their parents' public image in the community.

There are kids bound by responsibilities that many adults never assumed. While other kids are given credit for their abilities and lovingly soar into accomplishment, acknowledgment and healthy self-esteem — if they choose.

There are kids who are raised by the restrictions of their family's fear of success, and carry their early scars of denial into designing the frustration of their adulthood.

As I see it, there's no such thing as a normal kidhood. Nor is there equality for each age when it comes to the weights we each carry, the life styles we live, the pathways we travel. Each kidhood offers a unique array of challenges, experiences, educations and temptations. So too, we each have the Free Will to reject our kidhood or draw from it the best or worst from our past.

For some, the least responsible and most pampered kid-hoods often produce lethargic adults ever waiting for the world to serve them. While others use that early freedom from strife to advance their knowledge and appreciatively grow.

For some, the most impoverished, burdensome, dismal and neglected kidhoods produce angry adults in search of quick scams to make the world-at-large pay for their early sense of shortage. While others use that genre of kidhood to spur them toward creating emotional and material success and a home life focused on the love they once lacked.

These may be extreme examples, but life shows us that every sort of kidhood dangles its own brass ring available for grasping or dropping. Again, all choice. All attitude.

Through time, I noticed a curious element:

Many who pity others for losing their kidhood, are the very ones who lived the roughest early years. Who still cling to past anger without resolve. Who envision the kidhood they didn't have as being what others get for being good.

TIPOFF:

They're also the most zealous deniers of kid potential as they tend to expect the least. Possibly because they had so much demanded of them by their families while they were being simultaneously denied the voice of choice.

The ones I met often commented about kids encouraged to let their potential shine through as being: “Too old for their years”, implying there's only so far a kid is supposed to grow at every given stage. They rarely seem to consider that we all grow according to the level our soul has reached prior to entry into the physical body, according to what we're each challenged by, coupled with our choice to use our setup as a stepping stone or a stumbling block.

No matter what the beginning chapters may have been in our journey, whether we see it as functional or dysfunctional, we are each free to write our succeeding personal chapters.

No matter how a parent may have chosen to serve, every child-turned-adult shall view the experience according to their individual spiritual pattern. To view it either as a reason to win or whine.

QUESTION:

Given the many adults who live in total irresponsibility toward their work, families, relationships and themselves, how come no one ever says:

Hey! They're too young for their years?

Possibly many adults seek to keep kids behind closed mores because they're still angry at having been challenged with so much growth as a kid. Or because they don't want to see kids accomplish more than what they reneged on. Or possibly they weren't challenged as kids and are refusing to understand a concept outside their experience. 'Tis a Thot.

I bet if we look back upon the times in our life when we took quantum growth leaps, it's safe to see we were never really challenged with more than we had the capacity to triumph over — as is true from kidhood through elderhood.

For me, early physical and emotional maturity forced me to shed kid roles at 13. Quickly sprouting to 5'6" and out to fill a woman's size 6 meant I easily passed for 20.

This intensified my relationship with freedom as well as with Ashley. While it plunged her threshold of tolerance for me even further into a Pity Pit, it also opened doors into realms where kids were denied access by reason of age.

I recall the day when, out of the blues, Ashley and I were waiting for an elevator. She casually turned to a lady near us while pointing to me and said: “This is my sister.”

Not having requested this data nor having shown any interest in us may have been what motivated that women to quickly stroll toward the down stairwell. Had a new wrinkle cracked in our crumbling condo?

OK I thought, why not? We were never mom or daughter, so the sister scene might hold a glimmer of hope for us.

Wrong!

I forgot her once-voiced opinion of the sisters she voluntarily disowned. Oh, swell. Was the tornado on the horizon of our togetherness darkly advancing, invited or not?

Never having given up the love of a good hug, at 13 I still clung to my main squeezes, my dolls, even though I looked old enough for a manly hugaroo. Possibly viewing them as not proper for her sister, Ashley aborted my first dolls from my life.

I remember looking out the apartment window, down to the street where my royally named buddies, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, lied helplessly tossed face down in the gutter as a trashman relit his stubby cigar, preparing to feed them to the hungry garberator jaws. Was this Doll Abuse?

CROSSROAD:

Would I forever punish myself by denying dolls and toys from my adulthood, or not. I opted for not.

Let it be known that Queens Elizabeth and Mary did not die in vain. They inspired me to teach myself to design and sew my own dolls, even though I had to hide them under the bed or in the closet — where else!

As a result of this miscarriage of Doll Rights, I continued designing dolls through the years, and was later motivated to collect huggables for kids stranded in stress setups, knowing:

We all need something, if not someone, to hug.

Though logically, I should have been mad at Ashley, I wasn't. Her lack of compassion for huggies coupled with her anger caused me to wonder whether hugs were barred from her kidhood.

To wonder if she was just jealous.

In fact, her rage at my regal twosome, plus her myriad of desperate attempts to cutoff my ties to joy, causes me to now observe her from an eclectic viewpoint. One implying:

Though I can't go back to change what-was nor change her (not should I), I can bring sanity to my attitude about what happened. As I contemplated the many ways she screwed up the time we had together, I realized it was her life too. Sure, it was my kidhood but I had the rest of my life to live as I chose. And I thank God I chose not to live it as a rerun.

But she had no way to capture and relive what was lost. Not only between us, but between herself and her potential. This is not pity. It's simply an observation without anger that evokes my questions. Sure, they may never be answered. Yet insight is often gleaned simply by pondering our questions.

Did Ashley resent me because I was a visual reminder of her life passing by — a life not as she dreamed it would be?

Kids' rapid physical growth tends to spotlight our time passage. And for those not thrilled with how their life is passing, a kid's growth can quicken parental anger — as well as an overt denial of kids' maturation.

There's one questionably happy dad I met who adamantly refused to let his teenage son ever let one vacation day go by without ordering the teen-kid to remove all signs of his growing up into a soon-to-be-independent man.

MEANING:

Shave! Even though the dad did not obey his own holiday rule.

For Ashley, did my early physical growth heighten her desperation? Her not knowing how to reroute her journey? Did she buy the fantasy of happy-ever-after-endings? If so, did she feel reality was cheating her out of her illusion?

By not reaching toward others, did she think she was the only one cheated? That she was being punished by having been denied the Myth & Mister Fairytale? Punished because she felt she might be unworthy of love?

Coming from a strict old fashioned Irish family, did she adopt the Tradition of sub-valued women? Raised to think she held no worth beyond being a wife? And by being a widow, though young and visually beautiful, did she think her life was over? That she was destined to be a member of the living dead?

Did she resent my zest for life as it so drastically contrasted with her attitude? Was her refusal to get involved with another man caused by her fear of being vulnerable? A fear of getting hurt again? Was she letting her past destroy her hopes and wishes for the future?

Or did she, take out her anger with life by denying herself any pleasure? Was her anger causing her to continue sending whine soaked notes to her de-Earthed husband of:

“See what you caused me by leaving? I'll make you pay for this. I'll show you how much you've made me suffer by living the most miserable life I can create. And the kid you got me pregnant with will also pay.”

Sure, these are extreme suppositions. I present them to my WHYS so I can expand the Tunnel Vision that occurs when we limit ourselves to our side of a story. Not that I'm ignoring my role in our past or transforming what occurred so as to mellow it. I'm simply presenting possible reasons why she created the life we shared. To let me know I may never know and that it ain't worth the wheel-spinning.

Perhaps my determination to reflect on the multitude of elements that can effect our scenarios explains why I do not look back in anger. Nor see it through the eyes of guilt or regret. Nor wrap it under the covers of self-deluding ribbons and woes.

Clarity forces me to live comfortably with the Truth: She chose to act as she did. Same with me. It was all choice. What was — was. So be it and bye-bye.

Best memento from my past:

For every seeming deadend there is always a destination within talking distance, even if traveled alone; even if we can no longer Right Home to those who participated in our kid-hood scenario.

There's always a happy ending if we choose to compose one and play it through.