Worked for Peter Pan, It Could Work for You

My six-year old granddaughter is in this phase where she can go from zero to very deep thought in 30 seconds.  Happily helping Ms. Bunny organize her refrigerator, she looked up, teared up, and said, “Nana, I don’t want to grow up.  I’m scared of being a grownup.”

“I don’t want to have any more birthdays.”

“I just want to be a kid forever.”

“How can I just stay a kid and not grow up?”

“Ok,” I said to her, holding her on my lap.  “That’s fine,” looking over her shoulder at the wine bottle on the counter waiting to be opened. 

“But NANA, how can I stay a kid forever?” I could see the signs of her winding up for a full-fledged, show-stopping, cocktail hour-interfering tantrum.  There are actual tears running down her cheeks. 

“Peter Pan figured it out.  So can you,” I said.  I didn’t want to add, because it would be snarky and unmotherly, that her dad and uncle had a pretty good handle on perpetual youth.  “You know Tinkerbell? She hung out with Peter Pan.  He decided to never grow up.”

I can’t believe I say this stuff to a child in my care.  In my real life as a parent, I’d start outlining the reasons why growing up is really super cool.  But I know she would have none of it.  She likes not caring what she is wearing or whether her hair is brushed.  She likes being barefoot and grimy.  She thinks it’s swell to read the same book night after night…..There as an old woman who swallowed a fly….I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. PERHAPS SHE’LL DIE.

We tamped down her growing angst about growing up by taking our dogs down to the Lake Superior beach.  She skipped all the way from our house to the water, threw rocks in the lake, laid on her back and pretended to be a dog with an itchy back. Laughed when I chased and caught her and beat us all back to the house by running as fast as her little legs in her too short pants could carry her.  She stood on the porch and waved at us, her tangled hair blowing in the wind.

Later at dinner she sat quietly eating a giant ear of corn, one made just for her because after four nights of corn, the Gramps and I opted out.  Not her.  All corn, all the time. 

We ate in a hurry because the first preseason Packer exhibition game was on and my husband is very intense about football.  I hectored my husband about opening the wine and getting the milk, firing requests at him one after the other to compensate for my having so imaginatively handled the “I don’t want to grow up” episode. He shoveled in my beautifully cooked Lake Superior Whitefish, caught just that morning in Munising Bay and bought from the people who caught it as if it was Hormel hash out of a can. He is a man seldom irked by anything but football insensitivity.

He looked at me, eyes rolling.  “Maybe this is why she doesn’t want to G-R-O-W  U-P.” 

And then he went to watch the football game.

Yeah, fine, whatever.