By Beck
“I want to be a jellyfish for Halloween,” The Baby announced, which only gave me a moment’s pause.
Okay! I said. Be a jellyfish. That would be awesome.
A few minutes later, I was flipping through the family magazine she’d been reading and found the jellyfish costume that had inspired her, and was instantly really amused by the editorial discussion that must have happened:
Editor: Really? A jellyfish costume?
Magazine Idea Person: Well see, there’s this one kid in Northern Ontario….
The Boy wants to be a Transformer that can actually transform – good luck building that one, husband! – and The Girl wants to be Hannah Montana’s best friend, Lola. Her best friend is going as Hannah and they’re going to trick-or-treat together and it’s going to be really cute unless you’re an adult who doesn’t get it. Because their culture has already started the shift away from their parent’s culture, and this is the way that things go. Our kids grow up every minute of every day and start changing into things we might not recognize.
I was talking with the mother of another 10 year old girl and we were comparing pre-teen behavioural symptoms – the crabbiness, the weeping (frequently by us), the bouts of sullen silence – all of these ways that our once-known children are now mystifying, are now wearing unfamiliar and worrisome masks. And both of our daughters, let me be totally clear, are LOVELY girls – nicely behaved, kind-hearted, gentle kids, and the tweenaged mask comes off frequently enough that it’s clear that our real daughters are still in there.
Our real daughters. One of the things that I am the most dubious about are people who claim to still be their childhood selves, the idea that our childhood selves are some sort of unchangeable pure essence. I remember my childhood self well, and I am not much like her – time and experiences and life itself HAS changed me, and so I wonder a bit at my maternal need to cling to my daughter’s younger self, wonder at this need to tether her to 4, to 6 and say This is you, this is who you should stay.
Adolescence seems like Halloween itself – sometimes dark and sometimes scary and sometimes exciting – and at the end they come home and take their masks off to reveal… what? The same face as before, yes, but different, a new face for the rest of their lives. And as hard as this change might be for me as a mother, even worse is the wrong-headed belief that these changes are leaving her real self behind, like a four year old forlorn and forgotten on a Halloween night. The face behind the mask is her real face, and it is my job to continue recognizing her, forever.
I think you’ve captured my one (fairly minor) difficulty with my parents. They want to insist that the gentle, easily-wounded child me is still the real me. They don’t get how much life has hardened me. “Hardened” in any way is the one thing they can’t allow me to be.
With my son, his turning 10ish was the beginning, I think, of his becoming MORE of his real self. Before that, I think his emotions were bigger than his brain could handle and we had so many upsets. As he got older he learned to self-manage, his sense of humor become more sophisticated, you could REASON with him. As much as I look at pictures of him as a child and just want to squeeze that little boy, I LOVE my Teen version.
I have been thinking, though, about the characteristics of my children that carry through as they grow up. I have this picture of my daughter at 8 mos. giving me this scrunchy face look and I thought, at the time, she was just being silly. NOW I know that face is sort of silly but also her feisty, growly, get-in-your face look.
And people who knew me as a child tell me how reserved I was. Reserved? At first, I didn’t get it but when I really think about it, I am still very reserved. I talk A LOT. I am LOUD. I laugh like a hyena. I’m very outgoing. BUT. When it comes to my inner self, so to speak, there is a lot of vulnerability and I do keep so much of that to myself.
So, here is the world’s longest comment. All about me and mine! Narcissist, anyone? (Just kidding)
I think that people are their true selves at children but that our true selves are malleable. Our personalities mature, new facets develop, our experiences change us… hopefully, as all this is happening, we continue to stay true to ourselves.
Well put!
Not real self, exactly, but the child version is the person we first loved. It’s hard to let go of that, especially since that is when we envision them at their highest potential and greatest innocence. There is something special about that first version of themselves that we fall in love with. And maybe there is some value in our holding on to that vision of them, as they grow up and become mere mortals? Maybe, during hard times in their lives, it is good for them to realize that there is someone who still believes in all that potential in them, who recognizes the best that is within them before it became adulterated by the world’s cares and woes. A touchstone, as it were…
Adolesence as Halloween. I love that.
I would also continue that argument to say that the change is continuous. I no more recognize my 25-yr-old self than I recognize my 4-yr-old self. There is continuity but the self continues to mutate–sometimes it’s evolution and sometimes it’s degeneration but it is always in flux.
Yes, Mad. I am different now than I was last year, different than I was five years ago. This idea that we can recapture previous selves, that they are somehow more honest than we are now, is a strange one.
And at the same time, I see what you’re saying, Suburban Correspondent. Holding onto our children’s better selves IS part of our jobs.
Like Veronica said, my mother was always holding to this image she had of me as a child that was, somehow, who I Really was, as opposed to the current me and all the ways I was causing her distress. But it wasn’t accurate! While there are certainly elements of all the “me’s” in who I am now, I have been changed changed utterly changed…sorry, been reading Yeats lately. (No terrible beauty was born though 😉
Another great post.
Lola and Hannah. AWESOME. :0)
Jellyfish – – good luck with that.
We are doing a kitty and hopefully Buzz Lightyear because I already got Buzz as a hand-me-down. We just have to convince our little man that it’s really a Halloween costume because he already wears it EVERY day.
There was a massive shift in my personality when I was 18. That was the year, my best friend points out, when I started to like having fun (which didn’t even always mean drinking – I think I was opposed to all forms of fun before that). I’d say there was another change when I was about 26, when I found my first truly compatible group of friends and became much more extraverted. The most recent big change was in my thirties after I had my kids, when I gradually weaned myself away from the competitive, status-driven piece of my personality.
That said, though, there are some pretty big pieces of me that go all the way back to earliest childhood: the loving to read and being defined by my relationship to books; the preference for friendships to be few and deep; the being driven by the need to feel a sense of accomplishment.
I can see more of Bub’s adult self in him now than I can in Pie – it’s more obvious to me who he is and how much of that will probably always be there. With Pie I’m much more aware of how conditioned she is by her peers, so it’s much harder to sift out what is generic 4-year-old and what is the true Pie.
Oh, great, with all the scary stories you’ve been writing at your regular place, you scared me the most here. With this:
“…even worse is the wrong-headed belief that these changes are leaving her real self behind, like a four year old forlorn and forgotten on a Halloween night.”
Woe for anyone who falls into thinking they’re not their real selves each stage of the way.
I’m a weirdo because I still see myself in my 4 year old brain and my 25 year old brain. I remember thoughts I had and impressions that swept over me as a child and I realize I would feel the same way about the situations today.
Like sleeping on a bear-skin rug at my aunt and uncle’s house. I’d still put my finger in its ear.
I like hearing about tween Halloween costumes, too. My oldest daughter wants to be a Christmas tree, which is a relief until I begin wondering how I will manage.
forever, indeed.
sigh.
not looking forward to the tween years…
This is so poignant, Beck.
My children are still so young, it’s hard to perceive change. They are just growing. But looking back, I understand the concept completely. We parents have this wide-screen vista of our children. We see them for who they were, who they are and who they might become. Certainly, we aren’t the authors of their stories, which is important to remember lest we become like Veronica or Elizabeth’s parents, stuck with one picture they refuse to give up.
But if we let ourselves take in the whole, it’s a breathtaking view.
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