The Child Within
“I am still every age I have ever been.” —Madeleine L’Engle
It happened to me again last week. Our church bulletin had an announcement about the need for a language arts teacher at an area Christian school. I was intrigued. For ten seconds, I considered applying.
Then sanity returned.
I wondered, “What on earth are you thinking? You are 74 years old, and you left teaching decades ago because you didn’t want the unpredictability and stress of managing a classroom!”
Why did I consider the position? Because in those ten seconds the college senior, still alive and well inside of me, took charge. I was an education major in search of a teaching job.
A similar thing happens when I hold an infant in my arms. I think, “Aw, how sweet. It would be so nice. . . .”
I am a newlywed again, daydreaming about having that first, perfect baby. This madness lasts only two seconds. Then I remember the sleepless nights, colicky evenings, and fever-filled days. I suddenly recover contentment with grandparenting.
When I take my grandchildren to the playground and use the swing myself, I am six again, thrilling to that weightless feeling at the peak of the arc.
Last night, six years after my son Matt died, I looked at the last picture that was taken of him, and suddenly I was back in time five years, first numb and then mourning his loss.
We carry inside of us each of our younger selves. Morrie Schwartz, a terminally ill professor in Mitch Albom’s book “Tuesdays with Morrie,” said, “The truth is, part of me is every age. I’m a three-year-old, I’m a five-year-old, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old, I’m a fifty-year-old. I’ve been through all of them, and I know what it’s like. I delight in being a child when it’s appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it’s appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own.”
And that is one of the beauties of being an older adult. When we are young, we do not carry around with us the older ages we will become. But we do carry with us the ages we have been.
Sometimes reliving those stages is pleasant, and sometimes it is not. In “Gates of Excellence,” Katherine Paterson remembers the pain of being a peculiar missionary child, “When I walk into a room full of well-dressed people, I never walk in alone. With me is a nine-year-old who knows her clothes are out of a missionary barrel, her accent is foreign, and her mannerism peculiar—a child who knows that if she is lucky, she will be ignored and if unlucky she will be sneered at. But the gift of maturity is this—not that I can ever excise that frightened, lonely nine-year-old or that I even want to, but that when I walk into that room, I quickly recognize a hundred children just as fearful and desperate as I. And even if they are afraid to reach out to me, I can feel, along with my own nine-year-old loneliness, a kind of compassion, and make an attempt to reach out to them.”
“You are right, Katherine,” I think. “I, too, remember sneers about my appearance as a bean-pole nine-year-old with a mouth too small for her teeth. Thanks for the reminder. I hope that, like you, I can transform the humiliation of those sneers into compassion.”
Writer Madeleine L’Engle wants to preserve those stages of life within her. She says, “This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages . . . the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide . . . . Far too many people misunderstand what ‘putting away childish things’ means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup.”
She concludes, “If I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and ‘be’ fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”
I agree with you, Madeleine. I don’t ever want to lose those younger people within me either. Neither do I long to return to those stages of life.
To paraphrase St. Paul, “Day by day I am learning in whatever stage I am, to be content.”
Adapted from Creative Aging by Carol Van Klompenburg, published 2023, available from Amazon.
Carol, I was just discussing this with a friend today. When we look in the mirror or try to run up the stairs, we are very well of our age. Our memories of who we are at all of our ages is one of the blessings we can list to counteract our lists of aches and pains. Also, how many Ebenezer realizations we have experienced.