I Didn’t Know I Was Living the Good Old Days

Sometimes I look at pictures from my childhood and feel a kind of grief I didn't expect to feel as an adult.

Not because I want to go back and be a kid. I don't want to trade my life now for my childhood. I like being a mom. I like having my own home, making my own decisions, and building a life for my family.

But I miss how little of the world I had to carry.

When I was a kid, I didn't think about whether the bills had been paid, what we were having for dinner, whether there was enough money in the account, or what needed to be done tomorrow. Someone else knew those things. My biggest responsibility was usually remembering to bring my bike inside or being home before it got dark.

And time felt completely different.

Summer didn't seem to disappear between one Monday and the next. A summer afternoon could feel endless. You could leave the house after breakfast, spend hours riding bikes and climbing trees, come home for a drink, and somehow there were still hours left in the day.

We didn't have calendars full of appointments and activities. We didn't have to coordinate schedules with three different people just to see a friend.

You just went outside.

There were usually kids somewhere in the neighborhood. You'd ride your bike around until you found someone else who was outside, and then you'd figure out what you were going to do.

There was no group chat to organize it. No texting someone to see if they were available. No checking whether their parents had approved the plans.

You just knocked on the door.

And eventually, someone would yell your name from the front porch, or you'd hear your parents calling you from down the street.

That was your notification.

"Come home!"

And you did.

There was something so uncomplicated about that kind of childhood.

We didn't need an expensive activity to have a good day. We could spend hours making up games, riding bikes, throwing a ball around, or climbing a tree and deciding that getting one branch higher than yesterday meant we'd accomplished something important.

Sometimes we'd walk to the corner store with a couple of dollars our parents had given us.

A few dollars felt like a fortune.

We'd stand there trying to decide what treat we could afford, knowing we couldn't just ask our parents to buy whatever we wanted. Maybe we'd get a candy bar, a drink, or some kind of snack, and that little trip to the store would become part of the adventure.

Money existed, obviously. We just didn't have to understand it yet.

We didn't know what groceries cost. We didn't know what the mortgage payment was. We didn't know how much electricity cost or whether there was enough left in the bank account until payday.

Those were adult problems.

And then, somehow, we became the adults.

Now I can go to the grocery store and spend over a hundred dollars without coming home with anything particularly exciting.

I can look at a calendar and realize that the entire month is already full.

I can have a day off and still have laundry to fold, dishes to wash, errands to run, appointments to remember, and approximately seventeen things I forgot to put on the list.

That's one of the strangest parts of becoming an adult.

You don't necessarily notice childhood ending while it's happening.

You just slowly accumulate responsibilities until one day you realize you're the person who knows where the important documents are.

You're the one buying toilet paper.

You're the one making the appointments.

You're the one figuring out what's for dinner.

You're the one your child comes looking for when something goes wrong.

And sometimes you look at an old picture of yourself and realize that the person in it had absolutely no idea how temporary that freedom was.

I also find myself chasing little pieces of that childhood through nostalgia.

I'll eat something I remember loving as a kid. I'll put on an old television show. I'll hear a song I haven't heard in twenty years. I'll buy a snack I remember from the grocery store.

And sometimes it works.

For a few seconds, I get that feeling back.

But sometimes it doesn't.

The food tastes different.

The show isn't as funny as I remember.

The thing I thought I desperately wanted as a kid turns out to be something I can buy whenever I want now, and somehow that makes it less special.

That's another thing adulthood takes from you that nobody really warns you about.

Sometimes you can't go back and recreate a memory because the circumstances that made it meaningful don't exist anymore.

It wasn't really the snack.

It was being eight years old.

It wasn't really the television show.

It was sitting in the living room without knowing what time it was.

It wasn't really the corner store candy.

It was having two dollars in your pocket and feeling like you had the entire afternoon ahead of you.

And then there's the part that makes this grief even harder for me as a parent.

I want to give my daughter that childhood.

I want her to know what it's like to spend an afternoon outside without a plan. I want her to ride her bike around the neighborhood, make up games with her friends, get dirty, climb things, and come home tired from doing absolutely nothing productive.

But I also know I can't recreate my childhood for her.

The world she is growing up in is different.

There are phones and tablets and social media. Her friends have their own devices, schedules, activities, and family rules. Even if I decide to limit those things in our house, I can't control what exists in everyone else's house.

I can't recreate the neighborhood I grew up in simply by deciding that's the kind of childhood I want for her.

And maybe that's another part of becoming an adult that I've had to learn.

Sometimes loving your childhood means accepting that you can't give your child the exact childhood you had.

You can give them different things.

You can take them camping. You can leave the phones in the house sometimes. You can encourage them to go outside. You can let them be bored instead of immediately fixing their boredom. You can make traditions that they might remember twenty years from now.

You can give them the freedom to create their own memories instead of trying to manufacture yours for them.

Because maybe that's what I'm actually grieving.

Not being a child.

I'm grieving a version of life where time felt slower, friendships were easier, money didn't belong to me yet, and the biggest problem I had at the end of the day was whether I'd made it home before my parents started yelling my name.

I didn't know I was living in the good old days.

I thought I was just playing outside.

And I think that's the part that hurts the most.