The Lies our Children are Absorbing
/The Boston Herald
You look at her and see a child still, because that's what she is, a slim, pretty girl in a T-shirt and jeans, 12 and in no hurry to be 13. “I don't want to grow up,” she tells me as she's beating me at Spit, a card game I have yet to win. “I like being a kid.”
“You'll like being an adult, too, I promise. It comes with some tremendous perks. You get to pick out all the food at the grocery store, plus you can have dessert before dinner any time you want.”
“But you don't like going to the grocery store, Beverly,” Xena reminds me as she beats me at yet another game.
I am so lucky to be sharing in these final days of Xena's childhood. She draws, writes, fixes up the doll house, bounds down the steps morning, noon and night, is always eager to go for a walk and doesn't ever say, “ I'm ugly.” “I'm fat.” “I’m bored.” Or, “There's nothing to do.”
She loves horses and dogs and cartoons and that sticky sweet Rice Krispies cereal that sticks in your teeth and fireballs and freeze pops and sitting on the couch and being told stories and telling stories and swimming any time, day or night. She actually likes the adults she's with and the adults she's left behind and is seemingly unaware of how little we know and how out of step we really are.
And you watch her and you think- you are deluded into believing - that because of all this, because of her spirit and her shining innocence, that Xena knows nothing of the world.
But she does.
What the world has taught this very idealistic, incredibly sweet little girl is that more often than not people cheat on their spouses. Fathers who used to read to their children every night, one day leave and no matter how much they say they love their children, they end up loving someone else more.
And then the kids have to move to another house or another town and switch schools and make new friends or the mother has to get a job and then no one has any money and that's just the way it is.
You cannot count on fathers to stick around is the theme.
Xena tells me this in bits and pieces and not in these words. She tells me the life stories of all of her friends and the common thread is this. “Do you ever worry that your parents will get a divorce?” I ask her and she says, “No. Not really.” But how can she not?
When we sit and watch television, and we don't very often, mostly we stick to Disney films and home movies, but the few times we have turned into regular programming, there's been the inevitable infidelity. When we saw “The Horse Whisperer,” a beautiful movie, what do you know, there was the injured child's mother, indifferent to her husband while falling for some other man.
And Xena didn't flinch.
When we watch the news, it's the same thing. President Clinton/ Monica Lewinsky and all the talk that goes with this pair.
Xena understands.
A friend with teenage children says all 12-year-olds are like this. It's just the way it is. They know things we never dreamed about at their age.
I see this child's reluctance to grow up. I see her looking around and looking ahead and wanting to go back and hanging back so she can hang on to what she knows.
She knows that now is good and that the future frightens her.
Happily ever after was a lie, but so is unhappily ever after, which is the ending that so many of today's kids are starting to believe.
