Verve

My house is full of the chattering of ten year olds today, and my writing is being interrupted every few minutes with the same internal question:

“Was that a happy shriek? Or is someone literally dying right now?”

It’s hard to tell. The combination of joy and excitement and energy so often combine to create disaster, especially in a house with cartwheels and cooking and crafts, often at the same time. I just asked them to give me a code word to yell if they are really truly hurt, and of course they started yelling it immediately.

So much for that plan.

There is something fiercely alive about this particular stage of life. It’s like these kids hearts are on fire - ready to take on the world, able to navigate the basics, but not yet aware enough to worry about image and propriety and obligation. There’s a wholeness there that I feel like I’ve been working to return to my whole life..

But I’m not the first to notice this aliveness. There are a million books - treasured classics - that we return to time and again. Anne of Green Gables, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, From the MIxed Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler, The Penderwicks. All of them feature kids in these in-between years, because thier combination of competence and innocence make for such amazing fodder.

When I look back on my own ten-year-old self, though, I don’t remember the confidence and verve. I remember having to stand on the precipice of a world that I had no idea how to navigate. Middle school looming, puberty right there, higher expectations, and, for me. a profound sense of loneliness, even in a crowd. I thought I was the only one who didn’t know what the heck she was doing. Of course, now I realize there was no way that that was true, and I think we can all agree that there’s a lot less of the “throw them into the deep end” philosophy these days, but I wonder if maybe some of that aliveness is there because of the precipice that looms.

I see that tendency in myself as an adult. Everything is normal, boring, exhausting, until some milestone creeps up on me - my baby is going to kindergarten, we’ve been married 15 years, the big 40 is on the doorstep. And then I decide we’re going to make a thousand memories, stop and smell the roses, and make sure to take pictures for the scrapbooks all at once.

Or, the other, terrible kinds of milestones: a death, and illness, the quiet resignation of the end of a dream. The aliveness in those moments feels like a curse. The realization that this chapter is over and other is beginning, whether we like it or not. In this case, we’ve fallen off the precipice. It’s here, and we’re falling, and there’s nothing to do but let the wind pass over us and go where we’re taken.

Perhaps the ear-splitting ten year old intensity I am currently experiencing is a combination of the two. The milestones coming up and the chapters that are rapidly closing. Either way, just being in the same house is like a contact high. I find myself feeling a little less grumpy, a little more joyful, and mostly just honored to have the gift of these kids in my life.

Even if I’m getting a little bit of a headache.