Bona Fide
I spend a lot of time picking up hair barrettes from the floor. Not mine, my daughters'. I've decided, in fact, that they must have rooted a multicolored hair accessory tree beneath our house to sprout its plastic fruit directly into the carpet.
Because, surely, I'm not picking up the same barrettes again? Of course, I am.
Picking up barrettes the way Sisyphus rolled his boulder is, frankly, one of several fine-print clauses I overlooked when agreeing to become an adult. Motherhood = barrettes and stray socks. Homeowner = gutters and heating bills. Marriage = left side of the bed and someone else's company picnic. Grown up = parking tickets and taxes.
Hell. Nobody even bothered to mention the lactose intolerance.
And, to be clear, I'm not shell-shocked about getting older. I haven't had "20" in front of my "-something" for many years now, and love the new order of things. More often, I wonder how I got here. I mean who, exactly, is the numbskull who allowed me to become a grown up? I mean, doesn't the Grown-Up Committee know that I still prefer Bugs Bunny to MSNBC? That I squeal "wheeeee" and raise my hands from the wheel when I drive down a steep hill? That I still giggle at words like "booger" and "booty?"
I guess I expected to feel different once I became a bona fide adult: sturdy, worldly, and handsomely well-worn without being worn out. (Wait, did I describe my life or a great pair of Levi's?) Instead, I feel more alive, vibrant and relevant than I did when my tummy was flat so many, many moons ago.
Still, somehow I feel as if I've cheated the process. That I shouldn't be having this much fun with ... responsibility. In spite of the ever-budding hair barrettes, the oppression of parking tickets and that empty refrigerator space where my gallon of milk once rested, I know that the best half of my life is only beginning. These days, I willfully embrace myself for who I actually am, without looking expectantly over my shoulder for the person I intended to become.
That's when I knew I was bona fide grown up, accepting of my shift in the world. Even though -overnight, it seems-you become invisible to teenagers, indecent in trendy party clothes and intolerant of most music slapped together after "your day," you're not waiting for your spirit and dreams to wither and die. Wither and die? Not a chance. There's a whole lot of life left on this other side of prom, college, promotions and the picket fence. Welcome to Happily Ever After.
For everyone else who's crossed over to Grown Up, I look forward to salute you in this column each week:
"Wheeeeeeeee...!"
Ginger Snaps
My oldest daughter is 6 years old and a card-carrying member of the First Grade elite. As such, she's obligated to enlighten others on the life cycles of goldfish, to attempt reading anything with a typeface and to pose at least 50 questions a day.
Included in the 200 queries she posed over the weekend (yes, I'm serious), she asked what a degree was. I explained that a degree was a certificate you get for graduating from college. She asked what graduating was like and I gave a thumbnail sketch of the celebration.
"Oh! Like when I graduated from K-5 last year," she said, with carnival lights in her eyes. "It was nice. We even had cheese."
I smiled.
"You did have cheese, didn't you?"
She nodded in that First-Grade-elite-you-betcher-boots kind of way and then lowered her voice conspiratorially to add, "We had animal crackers, too."
Animal crackers. And to think I was ready to launch into the tradition of gowns and mortars and tassel tossing and marching through auditoriums to the flat delay of piped concertos. Animal crackers topped anything I could have described, because nothing else would have been more enticing than the familiar, simple pleasure of nibbling circles around a bear-shaped sweet biscuit until it vanished. Except, of course, for the apple juice chasers.
So when did it begin to take so much to satisfy life's sweet tooth? Sure, as our lives complicate beyond elementary school, so do the tools we rely on to withstand it all. Hot Wheels toys become luxury sedans before we know it, except we don't enjoy it the same. Slavish to our never-ending ramble of wants and needs, our joys and pleasures have been confused into strict lines of checkmarks and manilla folders. We weren't supposed to outgrow simple pleasures, effortless nothings that curl subtle smiles around the corners of our mouths and eyes.
We even had animal crackers.
When I was her age, I remember being similarly thrilled with ginger snaps. I can't honestly say it was the taste as much as I enjoyed how exotic the little cookies were to me. All grown up, I stop myself from giving poetic explanations for watching Top Chef, listening to audio books and eating a turtle sundae once a week. These are my simple-pleasure celebrations of the larger-than-life blessings and triumphs I've been gifted. These are my offerings for the miracles I allowed to whisk past me in that untamed frenzy to get, do and be. We miss so much.
But with each challenge, each chapter and every extra cup of pecans, I'm graduating myself from checkmarks and manilla folders into the elite class of The Living. Yes, I still have to be mindful about not complicating the simple things, the way we grown ups are prone to do but I'm hitting more than I'm missing. If I'm lucky, there will be apple juice, cheese and animal crackers in the end.
Engineering Degrees
I am the first to admit my science-math-spatial-perception handicap: I suck in this department. My father and husband suggest that it's because these disciplines require too much logic. So, of course, I let my inner artist respond with a few of my favorite colorful retorts.
Logic, calculations, angles, square roots and slide rules have always been sources of torture throughout my right-brained existence. I secretly envied people who could figure out percentages in their head or accurately gauge the number of people in a room. I envied them, until two weeks ago when I saw the television commercial for a high performance tampon.
You gotta be kidding me.
It was tough enough watching the scientific community bumble into one another during the early 90s, when every brand was touting superior tennis shoe engineering. I didn't believe it then and I really don't believe it now. Two decades of education and this is what the engineers come up with? High performance tampons? [Don't worry fellas, I'll spare everybody my technical comparisons of a regular tampon to this high performance version]
I don't know when we became so difficult to impress. Do we need video screens in our cars? MP3 players on our phones? Sixteen styles of cleanser for the bathtub? Least of all, high performance tampons?
I spend a lot of time picking up hair barrettes from the floor. Not mine, my daughters'. I've decided, in fact, that they must have rooted a multicolored hair accessory tree beneath our house to sprout its plastic fruit directly into the carpet.
Because, surely, I'm not picking up the same barrettes again? Of course, I am.
Picking up barrettes the way Sisyphus rolled his boulder is, frankly, one of several fine-print clauses I overlooked when agreeing to become an adult. Motherhood = barrettes and stray socks. Homeowner = gutters and heating bills. Marriage = left side of the bed and someone else's company picnic. Grown up = parking tickets and taxes.
Hell. Nobody even bothered to mention the lactose intolerance.
And, to be clear, I'm not shell-shocked about getting older. I haven't had "20" in front of my "-something" for many years now, and love the new order of things. More often, I wonder how I got here. I mean who, exactly, is the numbskull who allowed me to become a grown up? I mean, doesn't the Grown-Up Committee know that I still prefer Bugs Bunny to MSNBC? That I squeal "wheeeee" and raise my hands from the wheel when I drive down a steep hill? That I still giggle at words like "booger" and "booty?"
I guess I expected to feel different once I became a bona fide adult: sturdy, worldly, and handsomely well-worn without being worn out. (Wait, did I describe my life or a great pair of Levi's?) Instead, I feel more alive, vibrant and relevant than I did when my tummy was flat so many, many moons ago.
Still, somehow I feel as if I've cheated the process. That I shouldn't be having this much fun with ... responsibility. In spite of the ever-budding hair barrettes, the oppression of parking tickets and that empty refrigerator space where my gallon of milk once rested, I know that the best half of my life is only beginning. These days, I willfully embrace myself for who I actually am, without looking expectantly over my shoulder for the person I intended to become.
That's when I knew I was bona fide grown up, accepting of my shift in the world. Even though -overnight, it seems-you become invisible to teenagers, indecent in trendy party clothes and intolerant of most music slapped together after "your day," you're not waiting for your spirit and dreams to wither and die. Wither and die? Not a chance. There's a whole lot of life left on this other side of prom, college, promotions and the picket fence. Welcome to Happily Ever After.
For everyone else who's crossed over to Grown Up, I look forward to salute you in this column each week:
"Wheeeeeeeee...!"
Ginger Snaps
My oldest daughter is 6 years old and a card-carrying member of the First Grade elite. As such, she's obligated to enlighten others on the life cycles of goldfish, to attempt reading anything with a typeface and to pose at least 50 questions a day.
Included in the 200 queries she posed over the weekend (yes, I'm serious), she asked what a degree was. I explained that a degree was a certificate you get for graduating from college. She asked what graduating was like and I gave a thumbnail sketch of the celebration.
"Oh! Like when I graduated from K-5 last year," she said, with carnival lights in her eyes. "It was nice. We even had cheese."
I smiled.
"You did have cheese, didn't you?"
She nodded in that First-Grade-elite-you-betcher-boots kind of way and then lowered her voice conspiratorially to add, "We had animal crackers, too."
Animal crackers. And to think I was ready to launch into the tradition of gowns and mortars and tassel tossing and marching through auditoriums to the flat delay of piped concertos. Animal crackers topped anything I could have described, because nothing else would have been more enticing than the familiar, simple pleasure of nibbling circles around a bear-shaped sweet biscuit until it vanished. Except, of course, for the apple juice chasers.
So when did it begin to take so much to satisfy life's sweet tooth? Sure, as our lives complicate beyond elementary school, so do the tools we rely on to withstand it all. Hot Wheels toys become luxury sedans before we know it, except we don't enjoy it the same. Slavish to our never-ending ramble of wants and needs, our joys and pleasures have been confused into strict lines of checkmarks and manilla folders. We weren't supposed to outgrow simple pleasures, effortless nothings that curl subtle smiles around the corners of our mouths and eyes.
We even had animal crackers.
When I was her age, I remember being similarly thrilled with ginger snaps. I can't honestly say it was the taste as much as I enjoyed how exotic the little cookies were to me. All grown up, I stop myself from giving poetic explanations for watching Top Chef, listening to audio books and eating a turtle sundae once a week. These are my simple-pleasure celebrations of the larger-than-life blessings and triumphs I've been gifted. These are my offerings for the miracles I allowed to whisk past me in that untamed frenzy to get, do and be. We miss so much.
But with each challenge, each chapter and every extra cup of pecans, I'm graduating myself from checkmarks and manilla folders into the elite class of The Living. Yes, I still have to be mindful about not complicating the simple things, the way we grown ups are prone to do but I'm hitting more than I'm missing. If I'm lucky, there will be apple juice, cheese and animal crackers in the end.
Engineering Degrees
I am the first to admit my science-math-spatial-perception handicap: I suck in this department. My father and husband suggest that it's because these disciplines require too much logic. So, of course, I let my inner artist respond with a few of my favorite colorful retorts.
Logic, calculations, angles, square roots and slide rules have always been sources of torture throughout my right-brained existence. I secretly envied people who could figure out percentages in their head or accurately gauge the number of people in a room. I envied them, until two weeks ago when I saw the television commercial for a high performance tampon.
You gotta be kidding me.
It was tough enough watching the scientific community bumble into one another during the early 90s, when every brand was touting superior tennis shoe engineering. I didn't believe it then and I really don't believe it now. Two decades of education and this is what the engineers come up with? High performance tampons? [Don't worry fellas, I'll spare everybody my technical comparisons of a regular tampon to this high performance version]
I don't know when we became so difficult to impress. Do we need video screens in our cars? MP3 players on our phones? Sixteen styles of cleanser for the bathtub? Least of all, high performance tampons?
Dasha Kelly is an eloquent and accomplished writer who is able to unfold the spoken word into a variety of precision tools: as a performer, lecturer, or instructor. On the creative side, Dasha has published a novel, All Fall Down and three audio compilations of her original poetry. These earned her a place in Written Word Magazine as one of the Top Ten Up-and-Coming Writers of the Midwest. The Milwaukeean performs her work regularly throughout the nation and has opened concerts for comedians Tommy Davidson and Damon Williams and neo-soul artist Angie Stone. In 2007, Dasha will appear on the sixth season of HBO presents Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam.
