Shattering the Magic of Childhood

Or, I promise this isn't as depressing as it sounds

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

He wailed loudly; his heart was broken.

He was not to be consoled. I tried to fix it, to show him how it was still okay, but he would not be convinced. He was devastated.

It was a gel-cling Halloween decoration for our window, one piece of twenty, a small black bat-shaped piece of goo whose wing had become severed as my child’s small, chubby hands pulled it off the backing.

I said, “Look, it still works! I placed the wing alongside the body on the window where you could barely tell it had broken. He was not convinced. He KNEW it was broken, and that was enough. It was now imperfect, illusion shattered, in his two-year-old wisdom.

This was the first time this kind of thing happened but far from the last.

My oldest child, at that tender age, would rage with intense emotion when something would not behave the way he imagined it should. Whereas some children could be distracted by another toy or a snack or be cajoled by a joke, any attempts at levity while he was in his throes only made him wail louder.

It turns out, I can relate.

Though I was mystified at the time, I have since realized, he got this from me. I have early snapshot memories of the same intensity of emotions at things not working the way I’d thought they would — a decal my mom and I were applying to a doll bed that tore before we could get it affixed. Tears, yelling, running down the hall — me.

A joke my dad played on my sister and me, promising magic pencils that prevented mistakes. I conjured something magical in my head — Harry Potter-like, before JK Rowling was even out of elementary school. Then, I raged when presented with a regular, dumb pencil that simply had an eraser at each end and no point for writing. You can’t make a mistake if you don’t actually do anything. It was clever from my dad’s perspective, something to reflect on motivation-wise, but as a child, I felt like I’d been duped. Baited and switched.

To adult eyes, this looks like a gross overreaction.

It’s the kind of thing that makes a parent either exasperated or amused that the child can’t see how trivial this thing is in a vast world of problems and injustice.

But I have watched both my children wrestle with things not being as magical as they thought — crying, pouting, frowning. It’s taken me a while to remember, but now I can look back at my own early childhood, and I have the adult words to describe what I could only feel at that age.

It is loss.

When we are very young, anything is possible, and everything is magical and novel. The bat gel clings from the dollar store are gorgeous representations of a fun-filled holiday we are just discovering — costumes and candy, reality suspended. We have not yet realized there are millions of cheap Halloween decorations in the world, made with unfair labor practices in foreign lands.

My kids railed when things went south, I fell apart when some cherished cheap thing broke because we were learning.

Learning that those three-dollar plastic high heels from the grocery store are not beauty in carnate but just plastic — not unique but a pair among thousands just like them. As kids who are both concrete in our assignment of magic to things, and infinitely imaginative, we realize, one mini-tragedy at a time, that those things cannot contain the magic we assign to them. And it is devastating.

And now I’m laughing because despite being on the beach right now, on vacation and feeling wonderfully free and relaxed, I have written about losing the magic of childhood, which can so easily be depressing. I’m smiling because it doesn’t have to be. Depressing, that is.

I have been cynical. This world can make you that way, especially if you stay stuck in the phase where you’ve just been slammed with the realization your toys aren’t magical. And you decide that it means there is no magic and wonder to be had in the world after all. And maybe that is where I was once upon a time as a new adult.

But that magic never goes away. It hides, it moves around, but it is always there, deep inside of each of us. And sometimes the suppression of it leads to destructive behavior. That’s why you have to find ways to let it out.

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Another time I wrestled with magic and parenting overly logical children:

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Several months ago, something I liked got broken.

It was a set of green-glass juice tumblers that stacked, one on another, to form the shape of a fish standing on its tail. It was delightfully whimsical and visually pleasing to me. I kept it in the center of our kitchen table, where sometimes it was whole and sometimes it was only half a fish, with its missing parts temporarily in the dishwasher.

But then, in the normal course of living, it was knocked over and the head rolled to the floor, shattering into a thousand unrecoverable pieces. It was the first time something had broken that I really liked in a long time, and I struggled to maintain my, “No worries; it’s just stuff,” policy.

It was just stuff. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t sad that it broke. I miss that fish a little bit. I could’ve kept it in the cabinet where it might still be whole today, but then I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much. You can keep things safe and hidden, or you can let them out into the world to play, enjoy and possibly be broken.

This is true of the magic and wonder of childhood.

We can try to squash it in our children, hide it in ourselves so it doesn’t get hurt. We may do it out of that oh-so-natural parental need to protect from harm, but when we do, we deny our children and ourselves the chance to sit in the middle of the kitchen table and enjoy the sun streaming through the window. And we lose the chance to see the beauty in the broken things — a fish who has lost its head, a cherished heirloom glued back together, a psyche that has been broken and bruised but still perseveres and is stronger and more imaginative for it.

If we let our children feel that loss — the loss of the idea that the magic is in the things — they can go on to find and nurture that magic in themselves. They will learn to manifest the writers, artists, woodworkers and video game designers that grow within them. And they will not be (too) cynical.

The world is full of pain and injustice.

But that is the reason the magic is there. To help with the wrongs of the world — to see it, to use imagination and ingenuity to address it. But if each of us is going to get there, we have to go through that pain of discovery in young childhood. And our job as parents is to allow our children that emotion and to bear witness. To tell them it’s okay to rage, to wail. That’s how you get it out, that’s how you find the clarity to move on and do good work in the world and for yourself.