Collecting Children

In my last post, I indicated I would later discuss at length how and why it is I end up with so many of other people's children as members of my family. This is a topic I've been planning to write on for a while and one that comes up often as I tend to be a magnet for children. In fact, as anyone who knows me already knows, my children ARE other people's children. I didn't give birth to them, I met them when they were 4, 3, and 1.

As one of my partners puts it, I tend to collect children. It's not that I view children as objects, quite the contrary in fact. Children are just as naturally drawn to me as I to them. For me, I love to be around children. Children of any age, even my own teenagers making their slip-start ascents into adulthood which send most people running and screaming are pleasing for me and I like to be surrounded by their energy.

Children have this way of viewing the world that adults simply don't have.

When I was a teenager, somewhere around fifteen to sixteen years of age, I began to realize that adults--on the whole--simply couldn't see the world the way a child could. The way that--at that point, I still could--though, I was also aware that I was losing it.

That thought horrified me.

I decided right there and then that I would NEVER forget what it was like to be a kid. That divide I felt between my parents and I. How I felt like the adult world simply didn't understand who I was or what I was going through. Will Smith even had a song about it, "Parents Just Don't Understand." And I resolved that when I was an adult, when I became a parent, I would remember what it was like to be a kid. And then I started right that instant. I started by objectively observing what I and my peers were experiencing. I started observing children. And I continued doing the one thing I had always done...regarding every person I came across as an equal, regardless of their age.

One thing I had to learn about was child development. I recall the number of times throughout my adolescence I was startled to learn that a younger person wasn't capable of x or y task. I hadn't previously been aware of my own development and since I treated everyone as equal, I just assumed everyone could do what I could do. So, I learned that's not how the world works. I learned that people develop at varying rates and then there are some general markers--things to generally be acceptably learned at this age or that--but there are exceptions even to those.

With this new information in mind as I grew into an adult, I started relating to young people. Even when I couldn't really relate. And around nineteen or twenty, I started noticing my way of being had an impact on children I interacted with:

I was in the mall one day, descending an escalator when I heard a shriek of, "Andrea! Andrea!" and found two little blond girls tearing toward me.

I didn't recognize them. AT ALL.

As one leapt into my arms and I instinctively caught her, I looked up to see her mother rushing in to say hello. Oh! These were the daughters of the owner of the Dairy Queen I worked at at my very first job. I couldn't even remember their names. It had been four or five years since I had seen them and I had barely interacted with them then.

Their mother says to me, "The girls have been asking me about you periodically since you left the store."
"Melinda, that was like five years ago!"
"I know! You must have really made an impression on them."

As I racked my brain for how I could have made an impression, all I could recall was sitting and listening to them. When I was on my lunch breaks, if they were there (maybe four or five times?), I would sit and talk to them. They would tell me whatever was on their minds, what they were doing at school, etc. All I did was listen and respond like they were equals, as I always did with everyone I met.

It was many years later before it dawned on me why this made such an impression on a four-year-old and a six-year-old.

And now we come back to why I love children so much. They see the world with a level of purity that adults simply can't any longer see. Children are unafraid and unabashed at being joyful, loving, and kind. They prance along with reckless abandon when something makes them happy and throw their arms around those they love with grand gestures of caring.

Part of my resolution back then in my teen years was to never lose my sense of child-like wonder when viewing the world. This is so much easier said than done. Everything I come across in my day-to-day life as an adult threatens to steal away that perspective on the world. Even my boyfriends are sure that some day I will grow cynical. For the time being, I remain immune.

Children are, for the most part, my vaccinations against cynicism. Like booster shots, they keep my mental/emotional immune system strong and healthy. I'm frequently told I wear rose-colored glasses. Perhaps I'm not the one wearing something that obscures my vision, though. Perhaps cynicism is the real obstruction. Gray tinted glasses that make the world look bleak.

And children love to spend time with an adult who treats them as an equal, laughs at utter silliness, gazes open-mouthed at wondrous things, and does happy dances and throws her arms wide to catch them in greetings.