The Kidifesto

The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself — that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller…And maybe, Richie thought, that’s the scary part. How you don’t stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown’s trick balloons with the Burma-shave slogans on the sides. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you.

Stephen King — It — pp. 700–1

After the first, fifth, and fifteenth reread of this passage, the kick in my gut remains sharp. I don’t remember becoming a grownup. My first solo trip to the mall, my first lease with my name on it all on my own, the births of my children, that marriage — all things I remember. But I remember them as a goof. A large portion of my twenties was dedicated to the wait for someone to take the reins.

These dumbasses really let me walk out of this hospital with a whole-ass baby.

Holy shitsnacks, they let me have two.

Y’all are really gonna let me say “I do” to this Nimrod? Nobody’s going to stop this? You people are assholes.

Adulthood was dress up for me, and I hilariously bumbled through with an irrepressible wink. The sprightliness in my grown-up actions belied my title. I danced the grownup dance: barely the old “white man’s overbite,” to say I got on the floor. When did the costume become the uniform? I fought the good fight. I didn’t lose the kid in me at18 or 24. She speaks to me clear as day in pictures of myself at 28 and 30. “Life is busting that ass, but hey girl! We’re surviving!”

Since I held on to that part of me so long, why wasn’t the first time I wiped the fog off the mirror and saw tired eyes staring back at me more alarming? The type of tired that says you’ve been at this far too long and it finally got to you. Up until recently, I looked at losing the kid within through the same lens I viewed losing my wallet. I had it. I didn’t have it.

All this time, I thought Kid Mel escaped through some gaping hole. Instead, she eked out through a pinprick; an unavoidable pinprick to boot. Friends, there’s no inoculation against experience. Things happen, and they change you. A love affair gone bad makes you more suspicious and less spontaneous. One nasty fall causes you to firmly put both feet on each step before proceeding to the next. Bills force you to tell the self-indulgent parts of yourself no far more than you are allowed to say yes. And through some tortuous, slow, inexplicable evil, one day you’re a complete stiff and life’s a drag.

The kid in me remembers that knowing is half the battle. I have just enough kid left to know that much; just enough to know I should fight for what remains and reclaim some of the stuff I leaked out. There’s nothing that says you can’t still nurture the kid in you. Plus, part of being a grownup means I make up the rules. Isn’t that why I wanted to rush into this shit in the first place?

BE IT SO RESOLVED, that the kid stays. Indefinitely.