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Pitfall

For Writing That Doesn’t Fit

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Childhood Refined

Scram! Be Home By Dinner Time

The kids are fine

8 min readMar 12, 2024

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Photo by jules a. on Unsplash

Growing up in suburban Mumbai back in the ’90s, all that our neighbourhood had to offer was a dilapidated playground with the rotting steel surface of a lone slide and tactfully knot-together broken chains of a swing where more kids ran up and down of them than they could handle while pushing each other to get their turn.

Sometimes we found ourselves making up games with sticks and gravel stones whilst often arranging “playdates” with our friends living in the opposite apartment block by shouting out from the window and conspiring tall plans after school as our moms nonchalantly kicked us out of the house with strict instructions to return home by dinner time — which we didn’t abide by in any way.

And those were great times.

Things are radically different now as I raise my two little girls in suburban Warsaw where there is a “safe” playground to be found every half a mile besides a couple of nice big parks and even a forest that exists not too far from where we live — all the things I didn’t quite experience back in the day where I grew up, making it an exciting adventure each time I leave home with kids in tow.

It’s almost as if I am vicariously reliving my childhood, albeit differently, through my kids well…

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Pitfall
Pitfall
Manali Jarząbkiewicz
Manali Jarząbkiewicz

Written by Manali Jarząbkiewicz

Performing Artist. Storyteller. Essayist. Humorist. I roll with sarcasm! Reader discretion advised! ;) Subscribe: https://sweet.pub/@manaliwicz

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