A World without Childhood?

My lunchtime drink of choice is always Diet Peach Snapple. I love the taste. An added bonus is checking out the fact printed on the lid of each bottle. Some are funny, others surprising, but all are conversation starters. Yesterday's was thought provoking: "Bees are born fully grown."

Now, many of you may have already known that, but somewhere in my science education, I missed that lesson. The thought of anything being born fully grown never occurred to me. Imagine no frisky puppies, soft little kittens, or pink piglets. Sounds rather glum, doesn't it?

Sure enough, Will, my significant other, and I became fully immersed in thinking about this phenomenon. Will brought up a movie we'd seen entitled "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." The lead, Brad Pitt (Benjamin), is born old and gradually grows younger—the opposite of what really happens in life. And while not quite the same scenario as being born fully grown, it's the same kind of premise that can spur the "what if" in many of us.

So, what would it be like to be born fully grown? As I went through the day, the concept continued to tickle my imagination. Who would I be if I had no childhood? The older I get, the more I realize how my childhood shaped me. I find myself thinking more about those earlier years than I ever seem to reflect on those spent working and raising a family.

We lived in the country—not the countryside you might think of with rolling hills and other houses nearby, but the isolated kind of country in one of John Steinbeck's books. Our house stood surrounded by fields of weeds. And to reach our nearest neighbor, we had to walk down the dirt road in front of our house to get to a paved road to a huge farm.


Until I went off to first grade, I didn’t see too many other children. In today's world, I guess that would sound grim and lacking in socialization, but I had my imagination and daydreaming to nourish me. I spent hours alone in the fields and the woods. Wild strawberries grew in some of the fields and I can still see myself in suspendered overalls eating them, alone but not lonely. That time spent in solitude, I believe, made me self sufficient, but perhaps a little bit of a loner.

Each spring, I followed my cat to find where she'd hid that year's litter of kittens. I'm not sure how I knew she would have them every year but I think it was because she grew fat, then thin. The question of how the kittens came to be within her never occurred to me. I think it was trust—the innocence of a child who assumes all will continue to be the same in her world.

That simple, artless time of growth is why childhood is not something to be missed. What would it be like to be born fully grown? To be without that time to be, to think, to daydream? It's a treasure we carry our entire lives, but often holds pain, too. My childhood, like most people's, is an amalgam of good and bad memories. For me, the good news is that the distance of time helped put the unhappy moments more in perspective.

My wish for you is that if your childhood was laced with more sadness than joy, you will reach that moment when the sadness is like the sting of a bee, intense when it happened, but short lived in your memory.