When Did I Grow-up?

As children we are often told fairy tales to soothe us to sleep at night. What we are not told is that ‘Happily Ever After’ doesn't really exist and that Prince Charming isn't coming to rescue us girls. Though I suppose ‘Once Upon a Time’ was a long time ago for most of us and we all grew up to find that happy endings never came, finally seeing the veil between fairy tales and lies. Though I'm sure that those small lies are to prepare us or the big lies of life. If you don’t believe the small ones how can you possibly believe the big ones?

My childhood days were filled with dreams of Peter Pan and Neverland, occasionally squeezing Wonderland in there too. These were places I dreamed of escaping to, places one could run away to and never come back and never grow up. I was never the type of girl to wish for Prince Charming to come and save me, no I wanted adventures where I could fight Captain Hook, where I could have tea with the Mad Hatter and annoy the Red Queen. Real adventures to have my own tales to re-live. As it turned out the adventures, for life is an adventure, which I had were not the exciting ones of my favourite books. They were darker and the villains had no limitations as they do in the stories.

As you grow up you realise life is full of twists and turns, you never know which road to take but you must choose eventually. You look to others to guide you but only you can say where you’re going. I'm not sure when I realised I’d grown up but I'm not sure I like it, though I'm not sure I’d like to be a child in this age of technology either. I find myself pondering these things more frequently as I watch my nephew grow up in this modern world. I try to explain, in an effort to get him to appreciate what he has, what it was like before all these new gadgets but it seems to be fruitless. I may as well explain myself to a potato.

I'm a child of the 90’s and so in amongst my dreaming of far off magical lands I was aware of the emergence of all this new technology, I've witnessed the death of Myspace and the birth of YouTube. When we first got the internet I couldn't use it if my mother was on the phone, sounds like nonsense now. Back then things were simpler I feel, gone seem to be the days of playing in the street and playing make-believe.

This saddens me to think that the magic of being a child has disappeared from today’s younger generations, that they grow up so quickly and understand so much more than we give them credit for. In a world of iPads and gaming they no longer need to imagine, everything is made for them. We appear to have already turn them into miniature adults perhaps by accident.

So now as an adult I worry about bills, food, work and all the other dull things that are vital in life. But I cling to my imagination and still escape into those books that first fired it up. I don’t want to grow up but alas, against my will, I already have…