Childhood

There are a lot of little things throughout my day which cause me to flashback to a memory of my childhood. Usually these memories make me cringe, mentally.

I think childhood is really rather depressing, in general. And I don't mean to say that I was a sad or depressed child, because I don't think I was. I feel like a was a pretty happy kid for the most part. But childhood is so...rigid and constricting. You don't get to make a whole lot of choices for yourself. You don't know all the things you need to or wish you did. And for many situations you are totally at the mercy of the grown ups around you. That sounds so scary to me as an adult. And I don't mean you are at their mercy like they can hurt you or something bad like that. I just mean, as a kid, you don't know what you are supposed to do in a given situation, so you have to rely on your grown ups. If *they* don't really know what to do either, the situation can go badly and you're stuck in it and its not your fault. That doesn't sound very clear...

Maybe its my trust issues. I'm incredibly self-reliant to the point of stressing myself out because I refuse to delegate tasks to others. So thinking about being a child who *can"t* do things for herself just freaks me out and makes me sad. I think about times when I said or did something stupid. Obviously I know better now, but I wish I could go back in time and insert my grown up knowledge into the situation so I wouldn't feel pained when I recall the memory later.

I remember looooooong boring summers when I was trapped at home because my mom and dad both worked full time and I wasn't allowed to ride my bike very far from home (not until I was a teenager). Some of my friends lived across town so I couldn't play with them except on weekends when it was pre-arranged - even in the summer! I remember getting stomach aches over the thought of being stuck in school all day. What if I don't feel well? What if I look like an idiot in gym class? (Don't even get me started on gym class...)

Apparently, other people wish they could go back to being a kid, when they had "no responsibilities". I don't think of it that way at all. You couldn't pay me enough money to give up my independence and freedom, just to go back to a time when I didn't have a job or bills to pay. I will gladly take the job and the bills. And the internet.

Maybe that's the problem! When I was a kid, the internet was still very new. We didn't get a family PC until I was in the 5th or 6th grade. And even then, the internet was nothing like it is now. No social networking, no Google, no Wikipedia. There were AOL chat rooms and websites that you had to know the exact web address for. That was pretty much all I knew about. Plus, I only had one other friend who had a computer with the internet. You couldn't sit online all day, even if there had been cool websites or social networking - the modem (yep, the modem: *bingbongbing! Schreeeeeeeeech!*) tied up the phone line. The internet=freedom when you're stuck somewhere - doesn't matter if its a 10 year old stuck at home in the middle of summer or a business person stuck in an airport on an unexpectedly long layover. If you have the internet, you don't feel so claustrophobic.

Now, the younger me had no idea what she was missing out on, since Facebook and Wikipedia were still years away from even being conceived. But the adult me just can't handle the thought of how constricting and tiny my child world was. I would wonder about things all the time: how does this work, where is that country, why does that happen? The internet has the answers for me now, but then, I was just stuck wondering. How horrifying...