Childhood: the Gift of an Angel

Childhood is such a playful, untamed thing, like the wild dandelions that sprout along the cracks and curves of pavements. We bumble around, clinging to our parents’ legs, not exactly sure what to do with this precious thing that we’ve just been handed called a life. A pencil is a sword and cloth is a superhero cape, shadows are scary and school is fun! But as we now know, this grace period is whisked away all too quickly, and our world rapidly gets bigger, from our home, to school, to work, to the public. It feels much like the dandelions have been yanked mercilessly from their delicate position between the bricks, and squashed into a glass slide, another specimen to examine.

But dandelions shine soaked in rainwater, not under the halogen light of a microscope. A child enters the world as a blank state, and by the time they emerge from childhood, naivety and immaturity may have been left behind, but they are no more familiar with the new world they face now than the sheltered one they had been born into. A pencil is a pencil and cloth is cloth. We stare at shadows blacker than ink on the ceiling at 3am, and retract our egregious claim that school is fun. Expectations are introduced at every avenue, ace your tests, pay your taxes. It is no wonder that stress catches like wind underneath drifting autumn leaves, and fear is incited at the thought: if I can’t handle adolescence, how am I to survive adulthood?

Our fretting is in some parts irrational, of course maturation would aid in the process of development and equip them sufficiently for the future. Why is it so common then, that teenagers worry about what the coming years hold for them? Because just like all humans, adolescents are unable to entirely predict the outcome of their lives, leaving uncertainty to fester cracks in their calm. Exteriorly, we are supposed to be composed of amber. Unyielding, the product of time and natural progression, sculpted and shaped to societal perfection. Amber, forged by the warmth of family, heat of passion and pressure of performance; but a cold, impassive result, frozen in perpetuity. We are expected to stare unflinchingly as foreign hands separate our childhood from us, but deep down, I think we still feel the presence of dandelions, wilting in uncertainty and worry. Some people relent their innocence, others tussle for it, but time is time, and it would always move on, taking childhood with it.

Does it necessarily mean that what we look back on with nostalgia is gone? Under the rays of the sun, both amber and dandelions shine golden in the silhouettes of people that mill about. While we are on our way to work, we catch glimpses of the past in an ice cream cone, a toy store, an abandoned playground. And ironically, the closer we are to adulthood, the more opportunity we have to play out our childhood fantasies. We can buy ourselves any ice cream flavour with the wallet that sits heavy in our pockets now, walk for as long as we want in the aisles filled with figurines and dolls, sit on the swings and stare at sunsets after a long day of work…

Sprawling dandelions are tamed into pretty bouquets and thrusted back into our hands.

It can’t be that wrong to accept the bouquet happily. There isn’t much in the way preventing us from finally claiming our time in the sun, and it would be no more self-serving than those that use their not-inconsiderable power to achieve their goals. Some can be considered more selfish than others, revolving around money and fame; others selfless, with the wish to fix the world and all of its problems. Ultimately, they all satisfy personal wants of self-fulfilment and importance, and rejecting the adult world and using our new-found capabilities to instead make the most of our belated childhood similarly addresses our desire for the return of simpler times .

But a startling number of people turn down the flowers. Frivolities, they deem them, inconsequential compared to their aims despite how tempting they might be. More pertinently, the reason for rejection is closely tied with what else had also been left behind. A child is naive, and in their naivety, innocent to the world. With adulthood comes newfound knowledge, in some sense a burden, that will never allow us be truly content with our ice cream cones while the rest of the world rots in its own festering mess of flaws. The child will grow to learn about causes and communities, and most importantly, issues. Issues with humans, issues with nature, issues that they cannot entirely dissociate themselves from, and therefore issues they will become entangled in. Despite the supposed apathy teenagers display nowadays, we do subconsciously integrate ourselves into topics of personal interest, like the economy, the environment, politics etc. Even in the instance that no roles and responsibilities are foisted upon us and we can simply enjoy our ice cream cones, but the desire in us to know more, coupled with unbridled compulsivity motivates us to involve ourselves in our surroundings, and thus precedes our want for childhood to return.

So even those who take the bouquet do so gingerly, the first gentle touch yellow flowers have felt. We are scared to look at it more than once in a while, for we might find ourselves too inclined to indulge our nostalgic side. An ice cream cone every month, maybe, nothing more because we have reached a realisation that abandoning what we have will not necessarily make us happier in the end. In the play Saint Joan, Dunois, a man with no affectations or foolish illusions, admits his love for war, likening himself to “a man with two wives”. In our lives we would fall in love with more and more things along the way, building up a collection of “wives”, if you would. Childhood is the first love we could have never treated properly with bumbling hands, so many look back on it wishing they could treasure it more. But the time has passed and wishing to return to it would mean having to forsake all our other lovers, something that is not so worthwhile after all.

So dandelions remain under wraps of kraft paper, the gift of an angel laid on a table amidst piles of documents and files, pictures and paperweights.