Eat the Chocolate

Top 10 reasons to never grow up:

10. Number One reason to not grow up: Candy.

When you are a kid you can eat all the candy you want and never have to worry about a thing. You don’t worry about the cavities, dentist visits, brushing, flossing, or even the calories consumed. You think about the chocolate that melts in your mouth. You think about the gummy sugar bears that stick to your teeth. You think about the colorful lifesavers and who can make theirs last the longest in her mouth before it disappears. And then there are the m & m’s. 

Remember the light brown ones? Those were the best. Light brown and dark brown and red and yellow. Those were all the best colors to get the most of inside the little brown package. It was better than Christmas morning to rip open the top and dump the contents into your hand. You and your sister would giggle, “melt in your mouth not in your hand” as your hands became rainbow stained.

The swapping of colors began and your tongues danced with melting candy coating and sweet milk chocolate. Your teeth crunched the candy shell in half so that you could suck out the chocoalte innards to savor those the longest. You craved candy and wanted candy all the time. You asked for candy at the grocery store. You asked for candy in the car. You could never eat enough candy. Kids and candy are synonyms in the dictionary. 

It’s only when you become an adult that candy becomes the enemy. 

It starts out with a simple, “You have a small cavity that needs to be filled here in the back. You may need to cut back on those sugary snacks.”

Then it gets worse, “Your blood pressure is really very high. Have you considered cutting back on your sugar intake? You know, too much sugar in your diet can lead to heart disease, diabetes, heart attacks,” the doctor’s voice falters. He clears his throat awkwardly, “If you cut out sugar, you may be able to lose 10, 20, or even up to 50 pounds quite easily!” 

Candy, dammit, you used to be my friend.

9. Number two reason to not grow up: Money.

When you are a kid you don’t think about money in real terms. If you think about money at all it is when you are asking for money to buy candy (see above reason to not grow up). You will beg for those two quarters to buy a Hershey bar until your parents or grandparents relent just to get you to shut up and go away.

Yes, candy bars used to cost fifty cents. Think of all the candy that could be bought for so little money! Because now money is worth so much more…or is it less? What a brain teaser. 

When you were a kid, money was what you used in games. In Monopoly the houses cost so much money no one but the banker could afford them. And every time you ever rolled the dice you landed on someone else’s property and had to hand over more of your paper money to another cousin. It was a series of, “No, you need to give me three pinks and four blues. Can’t you count?”

It never mattered anyway because in the end the banker always won. The same thing happened in the game of Life. Only in LIfe there were cars filled with children involved and a nice little story that evolved to keep the players entertained as they lost their colorful paper money to the banker. 

Money isn’t in pretty colors anymore. There is a car filled with children. There is a story evolving to entertain. And all the money does go somewhere. The banker is still taking all the money. 

Now I suppose that I do technically have the money to purchase the candy, but first the bills need to be paid. 

Now I sound like all the grown ups did, dammit.

8. Number three reason to never grow up: Work 

When you were a kid, play was your work. You had the whole world to explore. It was your job to learn how to navigate it. You had play dates to learn how to share without biting. You were brought to restaurants where you learned how to sit in a chair and eat like a human being for pete’s sake, stop using your fingers and use a fork!

You went to the park and learned how to take turns using the slide by always using the ladder and not climbing directly back up the chute to get to the top again.

You learned that playdough may be called dough and even be made into food shapes, but it certainly does not taste like food and if enough of it is eaten, it tastes even worse when puked. 

You thought being given the job of setting the table was an honor and a privilege because grandma told you so. You thought being given the job of drying the dishes was an honor too. What an idiot you were. I bet all the grownups had good chuckles over their glasses of chardonnay as they watched you strut around telling all your older cousins that, “no, no! this year at Thanksgiving, you got to set the table and dry the dishes!”

Little did you know that you would be setting the table and drying dishes for the rest of your life. Unless of course you found another gullible little person to con once in a while to bestow the honor to. 

When you were a kid you worked for spending money. You babysat and mowed lawns for pitiful amounts of cash that you saved up for days, all so you could go to the roller rink or to the movie on the weekend with friends. This was your idea of living “paycheck to paycheck”.

You babysat for the Andeloria family on Friday and counted the hours. If only Mr. and Mrs. Anderloria would stay out for another hour, you would have enough money to see that new movie and buy a Hershey bar. Time was measured in social activities and candy. 

Work was never thought of as an actual career. It wasn’t thought about as this is how I am going to live my life. It was more about making money to live and play rather than living to make money to pay bills. Somewhere along the path of growing up work became work. 

Life shouldn’t be so hard. Should it? 

7. Number four reason to not grow up: Death

When you are a kid there are many different kinds of deaths in your life. The death of your matchbox car when its wheel pops off quite suddenly. The death of your Barbie when her head falls off for no apparent reason other than the rubber band mechanism inside decided to stop working. It wasn’t because you may or may not have been trying to turn and twist her head too far in one direction perhaps.

You suffered the death of your pet goldfish several times over. God bless mom for going out and buying a new fish each and every time Aurileus died. You falsely accused your parents, with a mighty raised fist, that they were the cause of the death of your childhood when they assigned you chores.

Then there is the death of Charlotte, Leslie, Vada, Mufasa…honestly, the list could go on and on. Almost every book or movie that any child has ever read or watched someone has died. Usually it is a parent. Often it is the mother. However, in this realm, all of this death only ever occurs on paper or on the screen. Death is not a true reality that touches the heart. 

And then you grow up. It happens so fast you don’t even realize it is happening until your dad is wrapping you into one of his sidearm hugs as you walk in the front door. You don’t know if you should be hugging him or if he is hugging you as he tells you.

How could his dad be gone? It cannot be possible that the grandfather that you just had Sunday dinner with the day before, and every Sunday before that for your entire existence, has had a heart attack and he is now gone. What does gone mean?

Death is now real and there is no turning back. You are thirteen years old and you feel blessed to have known this man for so long, yet sad that you only knew him for so long. You hug your dad a bit tighter.

6. Number six reason to never grow up is that once you leave home you can never go back.

I’m standing in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. One socked foot is on hardwood and the other is on yellow linoleum. My back is ramrod straight against the white pine board behind me as my dad presses the ruler to my head. “Stand still,” his voice orders. My hands drop to my sides and I stand as still and straight as a statue. I hold my breath and think, please let me be tall. 

I had heard that hugs can help a child grow up to an extra inch each year. I had been squeezing in all the extra hugs I could finagle out of my mom that I could. I would hug her in the morning, in the afternoon when I got home from school, and even as she stood at the stove making fried bologna sandwiches for dinner.

I would come up and ask her for a hug. I just wanted to be taller than my sister. It was my one goal in life: to be taller than my older sister. I would give anything to be taller than my sister. 

I didn’t know then what I know now. Growing taller also meant growing up. 

Fast forward about twenty years and now I am the one measuring my own daughters on the door frame. Their heights and ages are documented in various sharpie colors. I had hoped to be clever and stick with a color coding system, but I was never organized or smart enough to keep it all straight enough in my own mind I suppose.

Sometimes I wrote down the girls’ ages and the dates. Sometimes I simply wrote down initials and heights. It’s the same board, but with random numbers and a jumble of colors and letters written upon it. It is a memory stick of their heights, but only a genius would be able to decipher it. Or someone with a phenomenal memory. Either way, I am not that person.

What I do know is that the girls grew up. They left something behind beyond those marks on the board. 

Yankee Candle would make millions if they could capture the scent of baby shampoo, baby sweat, and breast milk. 

5. Reason number five to never grow up: naps.

Yes, naps. I said it. Why did we fight naps as children? Why did we fight early bedtimes? 

If my boss came into my office around 2 PM and said, “Hey, you look sleepy, why don’t you put your head down for a few minutes? I’ll come back in about twenty minutes to check on you, okay? I’ll bring some milk and animal crackers too.”

I would kiss the very ground she walked on and put my head down immediately. 

It takes one toothpick in each eye and a crowbar under my chin to keep me awake past 8:30 PM at night. My daughters giggle from across the room and call me a senior citizen. I’m barely into my fifties. I have to wonder what I will be like in another twenty years, if I make it that long.

Maybe I’ll overdose on some Hershey bars. 

We know the chocolate won’t keep me awake. And I will die happy!

4. Does everyone's bladder shrink, or is it just mine? Which brings me to number, hold on, bathroom break number seventeen. What number am I on? Seventeen? How in the hell? Wait, that’s not right…let me count.

Number four reason to never grow up is that your bladder shrinks.  

And you find yourself in conversations about how much fiber you need to be eating. 

Don’t say it.

Don’t even think about saying it.

I know what you are thinking.

What with all that chocolate she eats, what does she expect? 

I’ll have you know, that chocolate is a bean.

Beans are fiber.

Therefore, I have a diet quite high in fiber.

Thank you very much.

3. The memory isn’t what it used to be…what number am I on?

I feel like when I started to write this top ten list I was going somewhere with this. What was I talking about again? Was anyone listening? Typical…

2. Number two reason, giggle, tee hee, maybe this is where I should have listed the whole fiber conversation! 

1. And the number one reason to never grow up is that grown ups carry a lot of weight and worry around with them all the time. We need to remember to breathe. Take time to play. Spend time with the ones we love. And, most importantly, remember that life is short: eat the chocolate.