Muddy Jeans

{continued, sort of}

After we moved to the "new house," I had even more room to do kid things.

I played in the woods all the time. I would make up entire adventure stories, usually narrated in an English accent. We'd have to escape dragons and all sorts of bad guys, running, jumping, flying over hill and dale -- which usually meant navigating around pricker bushes and rocky streams.

I would explore my neighborhood with my "new" next-door neighbor, a girl a year older than me, and find endless surprises. We had special trees to climb. We discovered these great, hidden hills, which were steep and loose enough with dirt that you could slide down them without sleds! (I don't think my mom ever got those mud stains out of my jeans.)

In the summer, we'd spend almost the entirety of every sunny day in the pool. My mom supervised to a degree, and checked on us often, but she didn't hover. She never hovered. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to remember my mom being in any of my adventure memories. She was around, somewhere...

But no. I was not supervised constantly. I was given tremendous freedoms as a kid. (Frankly, I was given tremendous freedoms throughout my whole life.) I was never on a short leash. Hell, I was never on a leash. I walked to and from school. I'd spend entire days outside, away from the house, without having explicit times to be home and without anything like a kid-Lojack or cell phone.

This, of course, blows my mind.

Times have changed. The world has changed. We have changed.

I cannot picture saying to my child, "Be home by dark!" and then letting her go run off to God-knows-where for the whole day.

But there's got to be an in-between. And I need to write this, to remember, to remind myself. My parents trusted me a lot, and I (for the most part) deserved to be trusted. They also implicitly trusted the world I lived in.

So just because I cannot trust the world anymore does not mean I can't trust my kids. There must be balance, and I want to strive to find it.

That's Lesson #1 I Hope I Remember

But I was also circling around Lesson #2 yesterday.

Here's another memory I can't shake:

When I was somewhere around 10 years old, I was having a conversation with my uncle -- a man I didn't see very often and whom I didn't know very well. He was talking about his car, which I believe he'd just bought. He told me it had a sunroof. He may have asked if I knew what a sunroof was, thus prompting my response, or maybe I just felt it was appropriate to throw in, but I excitedly announced that our van had a HUGE sunroof!

To which he replied -- and this part I do remember vividly: Always have to be better.

This has stayed with me over the last 25 years for many reasons. First, I tried very hard as a child to never, ever do anything wrong. But I had. I'd clearly been "wrong" in what I'd said, and immediately felt horrible shame and embarrassment. It hadn't occurred to me that I would sound like I was bragging about the sunroof, or that it could even sound that way (especially not to a grown-up). I don't think I apologized. I think I just stewed with mortification.

For years.

Until I was old enough to think, "You know what? I was a child," and to realize that my uncle's issues had little to do with me.

Which is the other point I was just barely touching on yesterday.

For the first five, hopefully ten-plus years of a child's life, it is not about bigger, better, fancy, expensive. Things just sort of are. We had one house and then we had another. My address didn't matter to me. Nor did the color of my room or size of our van except in the context of my child-world.

Looking back, our van was hideous. My dad had gotten it about a year before "mini-vans" hit the market, so it was totally obsolete within months of purchasing it. It was an 80s-ized Volkswagen Vanagon -- like a bad "modern" interpretation of the VW Bus. It drove on diesel fuel, and was super loud, and if you were going uphill on a highway, even with the gas pedal totally depressed, you'd be lucky to hit anything over 30 mph. (I'm not kidding; we were once passed by a cement mixer on I-95.)

It came with an 8-track.

Nothing for a grown adult to be jealous of.

But as kids? Are you kidding? It was HUGE! We could STAND UP in the back! And the sunroof was big enough that if you stood on the backseat, as many as 5 of us could stick our heads out of it. Not that this was condoned while we were in motion on regular streets, but sometimes Dad would let us do it in driveways and private side streets (when Mom wasn't in the car).

I nearly died of shame from the Vanagon by the time I was a freshman in high school. But bouncing around in the back of the van with the sunroof open listening to the Annie soundtrack at full-blast (yes, on the 8-track) was simply divine.

And that's all that the 10-year-old self of mine knew. Meant. Thought of. I wasn't trying to be better than my uncle (or than anyone). I was just excited about our big, slow, stupid fun van.

Kids don't know.

Well, okay. Maybe some do, and maybe some know early and maybe some are malicious. But I didn't know, and I'm also going to assume that mine won't, either.

I had no concept of Darien v. Norwalk. I didn't know that cars are used as status symbols. I didn't know what a status symbol was, except maybe if you were The Queen and had a castle and a crown and a magic pony.

But really. Kids don't know. And I say allllllll this (to myself) for two big reasons.

One, because I want to establish firmly in my mind that our peanut will not know the difference between Napa v. San Francisco v. Connecticut v. Arizona v. the rest of the world. Ish and I absolutely made this home decision (and spent a bloody fortune) with baby in mind, but let's be real: she will not care about her home's resale value. She doesn't care that we decided to buy this place versus, say, a loft apartment in the city. Sure, she may notice if one home has a driveway and one home has an elevator, but one won't be intrinsically better.

And two, because holy shit.

There's A LOT OF STUFF OUT THERE.

It starts now, and I see no end in sight. The boppy, and slings, and bouncers, and 42 trillion strollers and cribs-bassinets-Pack-n-Plays and bottle sterilizers PLUS a bajillion-and-a-half ways you can do irreperable and LIFELONG harm to your baby that never seemed to exist before. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So I keep telling myself: The baby just wants to be comfortable. Everything else was designed for me. But gosh, it's all so crazy.

Except it doesn't have to be. Babies care about status symbols even less than kids do. As I sit and stare at these overwhelming baby registry options, I have to repeat: She doesn't care if her stroller costs a mortgage payment -- because if she doesn't like it, she doesn't like it. She doesn't care what color her room is, or if her lampshade matches her curtains...

Babies, kids, do not have any of the perceptions we do about their surroundings or their belongings. They just want to be loved as babies and as kids.

No matter how much you worry or fret or posture or spend, if you're doing it right? It won't matter what you buy, they'll always just want to play with the box. They will squeal with delight about your ugly van with the super-fun sunroof. And if you let them, they will turn your ugly yard into a giant, beloved sandbox.