When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Kid Again!

Pilgrimage to a Second Childhood

As a child, and especially as an adolescent, I wanted to be grown up. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to drive. I was anxious to go away to college and get a job. I wanted to be a successful corporate executive and make lots of money.

In dreaming of my future, I wished away my childhood to some degree. I was not living in the present but for some future life, at which time I would be a responsible adult and happy.

But now, my life has taken a different turn. I’m not a successful corporate executive. Never was and don’t anticipate I will be. And I’m quite happy with that. I’m doing things that counter my need to be grown up.

Does a responsible adult quit her job and move to a foreign country without having another job to replace it? I don’t know, but that’s what I did. That’s what I felt I had to do.

Last year, and for most of this year, I wasn’t sure of the reason for my big life change. Why I quit my good job, sold all my belongings, and moved to France. It felt like a whim and very much out of character for me — a “Type A” Project Manager and someone who over-planned everything.

After my first two weeks in France, the honeymoon period of having taken the leap, had ended, I found myself a bit unsteady and frightened. I wanted to know the reason for my unconventional move. But to preserve the fun and excitement of my new life, I came to accept it as something I felt called to do, whatever the reason or purpose.

But two months ago, I went on a date with a clown/magician who delights in the wonders of children. He asked me a pointed question. “Did you have a happy childhood?” It was a question that I’d have easily answered “yes” to in my old life, but now having left that life and seeing things from a new perspective, the answer wasn’t that simple. “Yes” and “no” was the more honest answer.

The “no” portion of that answer arose from events that caused me to lose my childlike wonder, bit by bit, during my youth.

In kindergarten, I experienced the first part of the break from a happy childhood. That was when I learned I was different –a black child in a virtually all-white school. Before my kindergarten teacher read the controversial book Little Black Sambo to her white class and me, I saw myself as just one of the children, I knew nothing different. Afterward, however, I understood that the color of my skin was not seen as a positive thing. It would be something that would create stress and conflict in my life and in the lives of people I loved.

My mom was enraged when I told her about the reading of the book. She demanded a parent-teacher conference to set the teacher straight. As a five-year-old, all I knew was that I had mentioned the book, and my mom was mad. The book, and the fact that the color of my skin and Little Black Sambo’s was the same caused a controversy and an internal dissonance for me. One day I was Patricia, happy-go-lucky child whose mom loved her, the next day I was a child with dark skin who had made her mom mad, and I needed to be careful what I said and did. From that point forward, I was less myself. I became guarded and afraid to be me. I was different and not in a good way.

That incident created the first crack in my authentic, childlike nature. But there would be other events, later, that would more firmly establish the foundation of my lost self and the need for me to go on this journey to France in search of my hidden inner child.

It is life’s blows and how we are conditioned to be as people that rob us of our essence and pure nature. My journey to France has been and continues to be a pilgrimage to regain this essence.

This is the topic of my next book in which I’ll revisit my childhood of the seventies and eighties and share the experiences of my second childhood, which I’m experiencing right now. Over the next several months, I will share excerpts and thoughts from my manuscript. By writing this book, I hope to understand what is necessary for not only me to regain my childlike spirit and live my second childhood forever, but for others to tap into and regain theirs as well.

I believe it is this spirit that fuels goodness in the world. It creates “can-do” attitudes and possibility thinking that feel so good and which replace hatred with love, a love that can change the world for the better.