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#11 Childhood Meets Adulthood

Hello, writers! My name is Aja Pollock, and I’m a developmental editor and copy editor. If you’ve ever wondered what Neil Gaiman, Bruce Springsteen, Isabel Allende, and Ron Burgundy have in common, the answer is: me!

 

You can check out my Reedsy profile here.

My theme for this week is "childhood meets adulthood." Childhood often seems to me like a puzzle that could unlock your understanding of yourself — if only you could solve it. Whether it’s truly possible to solve that puzzle is an open question, but whenever we can fit a piece into place, there’s potential for big insights. Hopefully, these prompts will inspire you to explore what childhood can tell us about adulthood. Happy writing!

This week's prompts

Write about how a person’s perspective on an event from their childhood shifted in their adulthood.

Adults – 31 stories

Write about someone who returns as an adult to a place they last visited as a child.

Adults – 83 stories

Write about an adult event or gathering from the point of view of a child.

Kids – 15 stories

Write about a parent who sees pieces of a family member’s (or their own) personality in their child — whether that brings them comfort, terror, or something in between.

Adults – 20 stories

Write about the moment a child (of any age) first comes to view a parent as a three-dimensional human being, and not just a parental figure.

Teens – 23 stories

Stories

The girl in the tower

Shortlisted for Contest #11 ⭐️

My dearest girl,If you are reading this, then you haven’t burned my letter. It’s more than I deserve, and I’m grateful. I can only imagine what these last years have been like for you. You must have been lonely. You must have felt abandoned. And you must have been so, so angry. Perhaps you still are. I don’t blame you.As I sit here writing this letter, I know I can’t tell you the truth when I send you away. So let me say it now: I’m so sorry I lied to you. If I had told you where you were going, you would have fought me or run away. And if I...

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10

Submitted to Contest #11

Mama says I’m still too young to come to the party.  Bethie isn’t too young, though. She’s 10, and she tells me that 10 is when you’re really grown up. You won’t understand ‘til you’re 10, Sadie, she always says. Bethie says that when you’re 10, you have to stop playing with toys, and you have to take baths every day and you have to brush your hair and eat kale salad and use perfume.  Being 10 sounds awful.But Mama says that you have to be 10 to come to the party. It’s a rule, she says. It’s a rul...

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A trip to the beach

Submitted to Contest #11

The sky was grey, the choppy ocean waves a mirror. The man sat, staring longingly out at that blanket of chaos wishing with all his heart to be feeling the salt on his skin, the caress of the foam and the sand between his toes. Beside him the boy fidgeted, unimpressed by the scene and eager to move on. Two pairs of eyes, grey as the stormy sky and crashing waves glimpsed the magnificence of nature for a shared instant before the younger’s pair dropped to his phone screen.“Why have you dragged us down here dad?” asked the boy. The sigh that c...

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Mother and Me

Submitted to Contest #11

“And this year my little Monique will place first in her class.” Mother rubbed my shoulders as she continued to brag about me to her friends. “Yup! She got it all from me! The brains… the beauty…” She pinched my cheek. “She’s just like I was at her age.” “Well, my Rebecca is a just a peach! That’s what all her teachers say!” Mary Kate boasted. “All the teachers, or just the one she slept with?” I teased. While Mother gave me a silent kick to the shin, I kept my eyes peeled for a chance to flee. The dress she had forced me to wear at this coc...

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Watching Jeremy

Submitted to Contest #11

1Dad had killed people. Before, I mean. Back when society had yet to go spinning down the drain. Prior to the whole world going insane. Well, going more insane, anyway.He never really spoke of it, but we all knew he’d spent time in prison. It was common knowledge, but everyone was too afraid to bring it up. He had the tattoos; a teardrop under his left eye, LOVE and HATE across his heavily scarred knuckles, and two spider webs – one on the inside of his elbow, and the other on his neck. I still don’t know what the deal is with arachnids. Dad...

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Even Princesses Wear Black

Submitted to Contest #11

Hazel waits patiently on her small princess bed, having already chosen a book for her parents to read to her. She can only understand a few of the words in the title considering the fact that she’s just in Kindergarten. But the little girl, based off the book cover, knows for sure that it’ll be a fairy tale, her all time favorite type of story.As she looks around her room, wiggling her toes underneath her pink blanket, the time on her castle clock catches her eye. It reads 8:30 P.M, making Hazel furrow her eyebrows. Her parents are never lat...

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"She Reminds me of her Auntie Eileen"

Submitted to Contest #11

“SHE REMINDS ME OF HER AUNTIE EILEEN”“She reminds me of her Auntie Eileen,” Eleanor’s Grandmother said, visiting her first grandchild only a few hours after she had been born, and wondering, as humanity has wondered for millennia, at a belly bump emerging into the world in a cocoon of slime and a chorus of screams, and transforming, with incredible alacrity, into a pink, crinkly, perfectly formed little person with starfish fingers and the slightest coating of soft downy hair. Her eyes were blue, and it was all very well people tal...

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Return to Silversea

Submitted to Contest #11

RETURN TO SILVERSEAI have returned to Silversea, after twenty years. I’m tempted to call it a whim, but it’s a whim that’s been germinating for years, and I knew in the end I’d do it. It’s easy to say it’s some trip down Memory Lane before I go to live abroad, but at the moment, at least, the job in France is only temporary and even if it turns out otherwise it’s hardly a million miles away and I’ll be coming home to visit, so it’s not the last chance in my life I’ll have to come back to Silversea. But it perhaps was...

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Comparisons

Submitted to Contest #11

“Mom, I wish you’d stop comparing my son to his father. I know you don’t particularly like John and I don’t blame you.  But James isn’t him.”  “I didn’t say he was,” Jane said, looking at her daughter.  Sara sighed, and shifted in her seat. It was morning and they were eating breakfast on the front porch. It was screened in so a cool breeze blew in off the lake. This was an ongoing argument and too early in the day for it. She looked at her mother, a thin woman with gray short hair and thick bifocals. Jane was terribly ne...

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The Things They Take

Submitted to Contest #11

The door was unlocked when I reached it, behind the tall grass and tangled vines. Well… Unlocked isn’t the word. It was hanging open. The storm door was gone altogether. I stepped through it into the kitchen. The ceiling tiles had started coming down. That figures. They had been stained from a leak even when I lived here. Good God… I Lived here. It was a lifetime ago. At least one man’s life. I sighed into the empty air. There was no one with me. No one to speak to. No one to grieve to. No one to care. The refrigerator we hadn...

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This Battered Room

Submitted to Contest #11

It is weird being back here, after so many years. And on the other side of it, as it were. Not that there are supposed to be sides in family counselling, but there always are aren’t there? After all these years, sitting back in this room brings home how utterly badly I failed. The only promise I’d made to myself as a kid was to never be like my parents, and here I was inflicting the exact same traumas on my own child. The councillor walks in, and I have to remind myself that I’m not a child this time. “Mr Peters,” the woman says as she puts ...

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Parent's Day

Submitted to Contest #11

“I’m an ol’ s.o.b. because it’s a big, bad world. One day you’re going to know just how tough so you better get some of it, too.” But I never did. The world knocked me around like a feather. I didn’t have Daddy’s boot leather attitude about life and certainly would never fill his shoes. Not that I wanted to. His opinion was the only one that mattered. I wasn’t allowed to think for myself much less “do my own thing” as we said in the sixties. We were expected to sit up straight, graduate from high school (as he had not), act like Christian s...

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Perspective of Age

Submitted to Contest #11

Visiting my old grammar school neighborhood recently, caused me to puzzle again about why I got the treatment and taunting from my friends that I endured. As I slowly drove past the well preserved and remodeled homes, some looked the same as I remembered from sixty-five years ago. Some houses were gone and replaced with million-dollar mansions. My old home looked smaller than I remembered. The perspective of age, I suppose. It was my fourth or fifth-grade year that has pained me for so long as to why. Why would my friends treat me like that?...

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Grandma's fence

Submitted to Contest #11

Receiving news of a death in the family can be the most paralysing thing ever to be experienced by anyone in this lifetime. When they called my cell phone to inform me of grandma’s passing, I literally hung up on them twice. It probably was the sudden shock to the body. She was my superhero. She gave the biggest bear hugs. She often would cover me in prayer. Till today,  I owe some of my victories to her. In her presence, I knew I could get away with almost anything. The truth is, I was spoilt rotten. Before sending me off to school, sh...

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Lost

Submitted to Contest #11

Home. Yes. That is what I had once called this place, the place I now call Hong Kong. The buildings are all too familiar, that comforting, warm, and humid air settling over me like a blanket. Everything is the same. Yet so different. The streets are full of children, with markets scattered everywhere. Clothing stores and food markets cover every inch of the sidewalk. The motorcycles speed past me, as the honking cars rush in front of me, just barely missing my face. The environment, the liveliness, I was once a part of it. I was once a puzzl...

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