My Inner Child Wants To Make Things

My dear friend Caite has a seven-year-old daughter, an orange-haired pixie with a mean tennis swing and a penchant for Project Runway. I’m lucky enough to get to spend a good chunk of my time with the kid. I always tell Caite that I want to clone her so I can have my own.

“She’s so chill,” I say

“Well, yeah, she hangs out with a couple of 40-year-olds all day long,” Caite says.

The kid is an only child, and her parents are two whip-smart and witty 40-somethings, so the kid is both of those things. You might call her precocious. You might call her mature beyond her years. She loves reading and art and listening to the adults talk (maybe a little too much on that last one, if you ask Caite). A whole section of the kitchen is devoted to her creative practice, complete with a drawer full of whose-its and whats-its the likes of which would make the little mermaid seethe with envy.

I tell Caite that being with the kid is like looking in a mirror. I tell my therapist it’s healing my inner child.

When I was a kid I thought I didn’t have an imagination because my friends wanted to play pretend and house but I preferred watching TV, reading, and sitting in the backyard thinking. I thought I wasn’t creative because other kids liked to draw and I preferred to arrange my stuffed animals artfully in a row.

I too was what you might have called precocious and mature beyond my years. I too hung out with a couple of 40-year-olds all day long. My parents were 41 when I was born and my brother was seven. We were a family of readers and thinkers and talkers; I could barely get a word in edgewise.

But I was not as free with my artistic expression as the kid. Maybe it’s because my parents let me watch too much TV (the kid gets one episode of Project Runway per night, while I fell asleep on the couch watching The Simpsons), maybe it was the undiagnosed ADHD that made art class unbearable chaos, but I did not have a crafting corner or even a drawer. I had my two eyes and my brain.

The woo-woo circles of the internet in which I so often find myself encourage adults to nurture their inner child. I have never felt that far from mine, so this has always rung hollow to me. But when I hang out with the kid, I feel compelled to make things. I want to go to the art store and buy a fresh notebook, collect pretty do-dads and display them, make things out of paper and glue. I’m still using my two eyes and my brain, but now I’m trying to use my hands, too.

My life as an adult is not all that different from my childhood. I still spend my days thinking and watching, and instead of arranging stuffed animals in my bedroom for only me to look at, I do it in the store I work in for the consumer public. I create stories out of my everyday experiences; I weave together strands of meaning collected from my observations. It took way longer than it should have to figure out that this is imagination and creativity, too.

But there’s another layer to my relationship with the kid, obviously. If you’re a mother you already know. The cloning thing isn’t a joke—I want one. It doesn’t have to be like her, though that would be preferable. I’d take a soccer player or a mud pie aficionado or a wannabe astronaut. I used to think growing up meant leaving the childish shit behind for more adult past times like drinking martinis and attending various galas and gallery openings, but the closer I get to who I was as a kid, the more I want to meet myself as a mother to one.

For now, almost every time I visit the kid, she makes me an origami animal. For my birthday, she sculpted a portrait of me out of clay. When I received a hand-drawn postcard from her in the mail, I cried. Tomorrow I’ll go watch her play tennis and make funny faces at her through the glass, and when she smiles at me I’ll take a bite of it and save the rest for later.