Hey, my lovelies! Am I the only who feels that this adulting shit takes a toll on your mind, body and spirit? Remember the days when you had someone take on the responsibility of waking you up, feeding you, getting you to and from your destinations, and paying all the damn bills? All this was taken care of while you lived a carefree life of hanging out in grade school, coming home and doing homework, and then getting to play outside while someone fixed your dinner. I promise we didn’t know how good we had it back then, did we?
I was recently posed with the question of “If I could travel back in time, what year would I go back to” and that seems like a simple enough question, right? Well, it wasn’t an easy question for me because there’s nothing I’d change about my life. Wait, that’s a whole lie. I would have given in to letting my father teach me how to hand dance.
Yes, I have had my ups and downs, heart smiles and heart breaks, joys and sorrows but I wouldn’t change anything because everything I went thru made me who I am today.
This question sat so uneasy with me that I posed it to others to see what they’d do and feel some kind of way about the answers I got. The first person I asked was my mother and she said she would go back to her freshman year of college and that gave me a sad pause because that was the year before she met my father. If my mother had the ability to time travel, I wouldn’t be here. This was something I couldn’t fathom because there is no way I’d ever erase my girls, I’d endure all of the shit in my marriage all over again for them to exist. Now, I know it seems as though I’m being harsh on my mother but I’m really not because I may not have lived her life, I was on the sidelines when she almost lost it at the hands of my father. I sympathize with my mother because she spoke with such a lightness when she thought about going back to her freshman year and having a clean slate. I am not here to judge her, only love and accept her.
I sat on the fence about this subject for several days because my brain had to process each and every scenario several times and I’ve come to my answer: yes, I’d travel back in time! BUT I wouldn’t change not one single thing. The first year I would return to is 1979 when I was 7 years old and we lived with my grandparents and mother for a year. My Grandaddy grew his own vegetables and my Nana made everything from scratch. I’m guessing all the time we spent outside is the reason we weren’t fat children because Nana loved to bake and we loved sweets.
I would go back to the night we snuck to the fridge for a snack but the cherry tomatoes fell off the door and we scattered like roaches, leaving my non-tomato eating sister standing there to catch hell for being out of bed. I would have been there more for my sister who was ridiculed in school for having bucked teeth because I know it was hard on her, I tear up now at the mere thought of someone bullying my sister. I would risk pooping and vomiting red all over again to have Nana’s red velvet cake washed down with red Kool-Aid®. Apparently being young doesn’t enable you to make wise choices, the gluttony takes over your mind.
The next stop on my time travel journey would be 1981, when I was 9 years old, when my grandmother was still alive and our family was tight knit and strong. Little did any of us know that a short 18 months later our family would be rocked and weakened by the passing of our matriarch. When I was this age, we had holiday cookouts at our house every year with all of my family there laughing, drinking, eating, playing spades, and dancing to the music Daddy played on his stereo system he set up in the backyard as the libations flowed very freely.
My sister-cousins would be there and we’d play on the swing set with my crazy sister going so high, she’d pop the leg out of the ground which made the entire thing unstable but living on the brink of death was somehow exhilarating as long as the family was there.
This was the time when my sister-cousins spent every weekend with us and we’d stay up all hours of the night, or so we thought, and make cakes cooked by a low wattage light bulb in our Easy Bake Oven ® and eat the partially raw dough with icing without ever getting a tummy ache. I miss the days of doing things which seem reckless to some but were common place to us such as making box cake batter but never baking a cake, just eating off the mix for days until it grew mold.
I have driven by my childhood home a few times over the years and am amazed how many times we walked the 2.5 miles to the convenience store on a whim and never being tired. On one of our trips, I would have told my best friend that she couldn’t ride my bike which would have put her on the sidewalk with me and not directly in the path of that speeding car. By the grace of GOD, she didn’t suffer any broken bones but she was forever known to my sister as Raggedy Abby because she flew up in the air like a rag doll. I have told you that she was an asshole and that’s not a stretching of the truth, it’s who she is.
To be 9 years old again, riding our bikes to the local lake no matter the season, walking around admiring the beauty it possessed, playing on the playground, and watching my sister drop our sister-cousin, who couldn’t swim, in the water. We worked together to get her clothes and hair dry and our parents didn’t find out this happened until we were all grown with our own children. We were smart enough not to tell them until we could drive away in our own cars and head to our own homes, we are not stupid. Oh, how I miss being in our basement while Daddy played our favorite records on vinyl while we sang along in the microphone, believing we were harmonizing and sounding better than the actual artists.
If I had the chance, I’d go back and snuggle up with my best friend in the entire world, our red Doberman, Baron. He was my protector, confidant, and sleeping buddy which is why I wouldn’t taint my time travel journey to when I was 12 as that’s the year he gained his wings and left me.
Back in those days, we had actual winters with more snow than we knew what to do with but, for us, it meant no school and we got to put on our snow suits and play while the adults cussed and shoveled the massive amounts of white hell. As an adult and mother who is single, I now feel the same way about the white flakes that fall from the sky because I have to attempt to drive in it and have had to shovel while my girls innocently enjoyed the pure beauty of it.
So many people, if given the opportunity, would go back in time for a redo because they feel their life has been so horrible when it probably hasn’t. Yes, we all go thru shit at some point or other but we have the choice to come out of it bitter or better, it’s up to us not the circumstance as to who we are transformed into. My sense of nostalgia is the only reason I would go back in time, I would make sure not to step on a bug or alter any item while I was there out of fear of altering the future. Okay, okay, I may watch too many movies but it feels right to say it.
In life, there is no undo or redo button, you can’t go back so you might as well enjoy every day you wake up on this side of the dirt because tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us. There is a way you can go back in time: find your family photo album and immerse yourself in the images, smell the scents of your grandmother’s house, feel the grass beneath your feet, hear the waves crashing against the shore on your family beach vacation.
If you ever want to travel back in time, all you have to do is close your eyes and remember the good times when your loved ones were here and celebrating all aspects of life.
Be great, my loves!
Agree wholeheartedly. Adulting SUCKS.