I Vowed Never To Forget!

I Vowed Never to Forget

Junel Barnes

I vowed to never forget.  I was about 10 years old and my mother had filed for divorce.  My mom, my sister and I were now living with one of my mom’s friends.  The lady had 2 sons close in age about 7 and 9 years old.  The first hurdle was getting accustomed to living with boys, which was new to me.  After the initial hurdle, we started to get along.  I remember one of the games we played.  We played “Whales”, a game where we pretended to be whales doing the things whales would do and chasing each other with large whale like movements.  We were in a fantastical ocean, with waves and danger, right in the middle of their mother’s living room.  At first, pretending seemed so silly.  I was too old for this, I was almost a pre-teen.  But as I played and hung out with the boys, my reservations waned and it became more natural.  I thoroughly enjoyed myself with those boys, playing whales and the like.  I had re-entered my childhood.  That year I was on a tightrope balancing between childhood and almost the entry point of the pre-teen life.    

Looking back on that year, I remember how our life began to get better.  Our life began to settle, the divorce preceded, and soon enough my father was a part of our past and my mom got us an apartment.  I always remind myself of the mental transition of re-entering my childhood.  As an adult, I can now understand why parents don’t understand their children.  They literally forget what it is like to be a child.  Their memory of understanding childhood the way a child would is erased as they come out of childhood.

Similar to Peter Pan, I had been given this opportunity to understand.  I look at this memory and see it in my mind’s eye.  I vowed to myself to remember, and I do.  But interestingly enough I recall it very much like someone remembers a fairy tale, fantastical and delightful, but not really real.  I guess once upon a time I grew into an adult.