Were You Ever Their Age?

My grandson, Adam, was talking about turning 5. He was planning his birthday party, naming the friends he was going to invite, telling me that The Backyardigans is the theme he’d chosen this year. "And we’re going to have pretzels and cake and an obstacle course," he said.

"I remember my fifth birthday party," I told him.

And he said, "You do?" not quite believing.

Together we dug through a box of photos until we found a slightly out-of-focus black-and-white picture of a little girl at a long table, a party hat on her head, two girls to her right, a boy to her left, all smiling for the camera.

"That's me," I said pointing.

He studied the picture, then looked back at me and frowned. And I laughed out loud, because I recognized his absolute disbelief. I remember my mother saying to me, mostly out of frustration, "Do you think I was born old?" and shaking my head no, because that’s what I was supposed to do. But knowing in my heart that, yes, I did believe she was old and always had been.

It is inconceivable to my grandson that I could ever have been a child, never mind a child his age. I am his Mimi. This is my role in his life story.

What is inconceivable to me is that I am not a child anymore or a teenager, or a young mother, or 20, or 30, or 40, or 50. Not on the outside, anyway. Not where people see. And that all of our lives are circumscribed by this. Because all of our lives we are more than what we are at a single moment. We are every age and every person we have ever been. 

If only we could press a button and turn into who we were. "See. I'm right here, Adam. I'm 5. Want to play tag?"

"I'm 27," I'd say to a friend. "I understand how you feel."

"I'm 50. I know."

Or if only we could be like Bert with Mary Poppins and pop into a colorful scene we've sketched not with chalk but with words. "Take my hand. Come. I'll show you how it was."

"I wish I knew you when you were young," I used to say to my mother-in-law. She'd be telling me stories about growing up in Glasgow. About the flat she lived in with her sister and brothers. About the hill she climbed to school. About her first boyfriend, Ian. About the day her father came home from [the] war. 

And though she supplemented the stories with pictures and air-mail letters, though she even took us to Glasgow so we could see in person all the places she'd described, she remained for me and for my children always Grandma — never Peggy, never the girl she was.

I can tell my grandson that on my fifth birthday I got a Cinderella watch with a blue band. And that underneath the party tablecloth, there was a red chrome table that had a built-in drawer for silverware at the far end, and out of sight to the right, stood the white porcelain stove my mother cooked on. Down the hall was my bedroom with the circus wallpaper, which my father hung. Across the hall in a closet was his police uniform, neatly pressed; behind the bathroom door on a hook hung my mother’s fleece robe.

And he might repeat this. But he can’t experience it because the sad fact is our lives are books that only we can read.

Today is Adam's birthday and already he has pages full of things I don’t know about, mornings spent at school, afternoons with friends, days with his cousins in Maine, weekends with Grammy and Grampy, outings to zoos and parks and museums.

Today is his birthday and I'll take pictures in the hope that some day when he is a man, he will come across one and remember The Backyardigans cake his auntie made, the jump-house his Uncle Dave set up, his friends Holly and Richie, and being 5 with his whole life before him surrounded by family and love. And his Mimi, behind the camera, recording it all.