Never Walked In High Heels

It was late at night when I finally began to think about suffering. The lights were going out and I was sitting in my favorite spot in the flat looking at the river Thames go by. On the staircase I thought “nobody likes to suffer.” Earlier that week there had been flashing lights and sirens on the bridge that crosses an area of our local quay. The road was blocked off for hours, and we had to go the long way around the neighborhood in order to visit our local supermarket and shopping centre. After it was finally cleared away, four bouquets of flowers had been tied to posts of the barricade which prevents people from falling into the river. An eleven year old boy had jumped in on a hot summers day and on the way down, hit his head against the wall causing him to lose consciousness. It took two hours for emergency crew to find his body.

A friend of mine, when he reported this to me, kept saying over and over “We told those kids not to play there; not to jump in.” I could see the frustration that comes with age and understanding dangers that children remain ignorant to or choose to ignore. I don’t think he would be as upset if a seventeen year old had done the same thing, but an eleven year old. My friend was visibly frustrated.

If you live long enough, you will be miserable. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how protected your life is. It’s a fact of the human condition; you will suffer. And you will be tested in how much you are determined that life is worth living. The alternative is that you die young, as the case of our neighbor boy. In that case you inevitably make a bunch of other people miserable and such is the depressing side of the circle of life. We love; we grow attached to people, things, ideas, places, and they are inevitably taken away and we are given the choice to clutch on thereby suffocating ourselves and the people around or let go thereby accepting the pain, accepting change and forcing ourselves to never have any stability at all.

A book I was reading not too long ago explained that a sociologist interviewed the victims who’d survived the Jewish concentration camps of the second World War to ask what effect the experience had on their faith. The findings were shocking:

“During the 1970’s, a man named Reeve Robert Brenner surveyed 1000 survivors of the Holocaust, enquiring especially about their religious faith.

How had the experience of the Holocaust effected their beliefs about God? Somewhat astonishingly almost half claimed that the Holocaust had no effect on their beliefs about God. But the other half told a different story. Of the total number surveyed, 11 percent said they had rejected all belief in the existence of God as a direct result of their experience. After the war, they never regained faith. Analyzing their detailed responses, Brenner noted that their professed atheism seemed less a matter of theological belief and more of an emotional reaction, an expression of deep hurt and anger against God for abandoning them” (From: Where is God When it Hurts by Phillip Yancey)

Suffering in any form forces us to reevaluate our ideas about the bedrock of what we base our life on. The eleven percent of people who became atheists as a result of their experience, it means taking a good long hard look at one’s own religion, turning around, and walking away. For others it means undergoing that same examination of one’s beliefs and deciding if they are worth keeping, need to be re-edited, or need to be thrown out entirely. Assuming that there is a God out there, many of us, think that it must be pretty easy being in control of the entire universe. One can look at the Old Testament as well as the Torah and characters such as Moses and Abraham who believed in an absolute God with an enormous personality. As individuals who said to their creator, “Sure it’s easy being up there, why don’t you come down here for a bit and try it out huh?”

As humans, when we think about God, we are torn between two dichotomies. The first is we want Him to suffer. We want him to know how difficult life is if He is out there, and do everything He can to improve it. But the irony of it is, if there is a God. Do we have any room in our human ideology for a God that willingly sacrifices and goes through agony? We can’t stand the idea of a God who lives above us oblivious to the concept of human pain and suffering, and yet the idea that an all powerful being that would willingly submit himself to such agony and pain completely out of love is outside our concept of what God is. We have no classification for a God who feels pain by choice. Perhaps it’s a contradiction of terms, someone who is almighty and chooses the difficult way.

I think about the family of the little boy who jumped into the water two weeks ago, how much suffering they must be going through now. The truth is not only do I hate it; I get every bit as angry as my friend. A child didn’t live long enough to suffer, and ironically, that’s what angers us all. The fact is that his life was cut short on a whim. Now his family is left picking up the pieces, asking the questions which inevitably come from suffering and searching for answers.

In this way, the child is very much like our preconception of God. We want every child to live long enough to know what suffering is and to ask questions about life himself rather than asking them in the wake of a child’s death. But ironically, like everyone else, we know that it would be much simpler if neither God, nor the child, nor anyone else had to suffer in the first place.

As a performer I often have to force myself to watch things that are immensely popular despite the fact that I hate them. I am at home today watching the entire first season of Glee; and truth be told, I can’t stand it. To me all I can see is a bunch of teenagers encouraging America to continue with bad theatre and poor acting habits. So many amateur thespians in America think that the apex of acting comes when you can smile big and sing loudly on cue, which only perpetuates those poor habits and generally bad theatre.

As I am watching, one of the teachers said to the students “Adults have to make difficult choices.” The tone in which he says it is pejorative at best. Adults have to make difficult choices? What about high schoolers? Don’t they have difficult decisions. When I was in high school, I was never able to have the world revolve around who I was interested in dating or what the cheerleaders were doing that Saturday night. A typical day in high school consisted of me putting on a three-piece suit and carrying a suitcase; worrying about making grades that were high enough that I wouldn’t be sent back into special education classes due to an over-controlling teacher who insisted that all students with disabilities be taught solely by her. Every “B” I received on an exam was a sign for red alert; and often I chose between sleep I needed to make it to the next day and putting in that extra four hours on an English paper when I was only able to type at an alarmingly slow rate. Teachers supported me, and often ran interference between myself and my school administration. Sometimes even putting themselves at risk. These are the things I remember from my high school experience.

I listen to older American women who often say of their years before college “Those were the happiest years of my life.” Really? At seventeen? All their dreams came true when they were the lead in the high school musical and they dated the captain of the football team? Looking at my yearbooks this weekend, I noticed that someone wrote “Don’t worry, it has to get better than this.” Surely that friend of mine had more wisdom than the ones who said the period between the years of fourteen and eighteen are the most precious. What about the birth of your first child or your wedding day? The time when you realized that your family is remarkable; or having your own kids graduate from high school after years of struggling with dyslexia? That outshines being fifteen, having acne, and wondering if anybody will ask you to the prom.

Due to modern technology, I am able to keep up from a controlled distance with several “friends” from high school. I wouldn’t consider them friends that I have a relationship with now, but the magic of the internet means that I can look at what their careers are, pictures of their first baby, and engagements. Overall I’m glad that my dreams didn’t come true in high school. Now these friends of mine are working for insurance companies and shuffling off to law school when at seventeen, all they wanted to be was actors and make the world a better place. I’m sure in their own way they have come to the conclusion that they are doing just that. But for someone who did have a great deal of trouble in high school, I must say difficult years early on make one much more confident and excited about the dreams that are to come.

Last night I watched on a whim a film titled, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Which recreates the tale of a modern man who was forced to play it safe in the name of family. But still, given his preternatural instincts, wishes to go out and continue to steal chickens from the coup.

I see the entire movie as a badly needed commentary on masculinity in our current society. I remember once my father saying: “women marry men thinking that they’ll change, men marry women hoping that they never will.” And in truth, both expectations are unrealistic. People do change but maybe not in the areas that we desire to see that change. I remember being woken up by a newly engaged friend of mine one morning in college. She came to my room later than usual and when I enquired about this she explained that she was up all night cleaning her fiancé’s dorm room. I was a bit shocked. She was the most independent young woman that I had met up to that point. Her dream was to go live in huts in Africa, and yet here she was confessing she had lost sleep by doing something her able bodied fiancé could have accomplished entirely by himself.

“Don’t worry, when we get married things will change.” Why would she say that? Why would she insist this when there is evidence to the contrary, that all of a sudden with a wedding band on his finger and a double income in the bank account he would ever change? Right there, still lying in bed in my dorm at the age of twenty, I could see that my father was absolutely right. People will often marry others absolutely convinced that after the wedding, everything will change.

Mr. Fox was by nature a chicken hunter. Simple. People often have in their very nature habits that aren’t particularly pleasant. My friend’s fiancé was not particularly neat. That was a characteristic about him that as far as I see evidence right now, has yet to change. By saying “Oh, he’ll change”, wasn’t my friend ultimately saying, “I would like to change him”? And if you love someone, do you want to change them? Can those two philosophies ever come together? Can you love someone while still wanting to alter any aspect of their character?

Mrs. Fox said it best when later in the movie she admits: “I love you, but I never should have married you.” It is a plague on modern masculinity that we seek to change it in the name of safety and security. Taming the modern man to live under a mortgage and go to the same place of work day after day after day is ultimately conditioning men everywhere to be afraid of freedom. I look at the male friends I have in my area of London. A large percentage of them are single, substantially older, and of course they live on boats or carry out some other form of adventurous life.

I love my friends dearly, even though I have my scuffles with them. The point is I can’t imagine altering any of them a fraction. They are warm and friendly and they carry out there lives for the most part exactly as they intend to. That doesn’t mean not living in safety simply because that isn’t what they want. It means weeks on boats waking up in the wee morning hours because the boat next door is on fire. It means not having a plan and living comfortably with the idea that at any moment life can change. I think about them and all I wish is if their lives unexpectedly change, tragedy or great joy, they aren’t forced to change who they are for any reason. Unless of course, they become more like themselves.

Recently it was my birthday and I started to think about what it was I wanted out of life during my tenth birthday. I don’t know why, but being a ten year old always seemed to be a special time for me, like it was the prime of childhood. All the books I read and movies I watched growing up, with characters I admired always seemed to be ten year old girls finding secret places that were especially their own. I looked back to a diary I kept during those days to see what exactly I wanted. See, I believe that each of us are built with desires and dreams imprinted on our hearts. These are the goals we are meant to reach for. These are the goals made for no one else but us. When we are young and unaware of the challenges set before us. This is when we are most aware of what it is we were meant to accomplish. As we get older, and things change, then racing for our dreams becomes less simple and we substitute what we were meant to do for what the world expects us to do.

A while back I lost a friend who informed under no uncertain terms that my aims in life were “unrealistic” and “It’s time for you to grow up anyway.” And it’s true, any dream you have as a young woman with a disability today is still highly unrealistic. There is no job field I can enter at this point with no typing skills and manual labor being next to impossible, where my lifetime career would be simple, straightforward, and predictable. Add to the fact that I work in the arts and the entertainment industry, which, according to him, is one of the most shallow industries in existence and you have a road map for someone trying to reach the moon without a rocket ship. He didn’t know it at the time I don’t think, but what my friend was asking me to do was to deny my dreams simply because the world wasn’t ready for them. Is unpreparedness ever a good reason to move on, particularly when it’s unpreparedness not on your behalf but on the behalf of the rest of the world? Would it be appropriate for an African-American fifty years ago to say that wanting to get a graduate school education at an institution like Vanderbilt was not a worthwhile dream simply because the school was located in an area that was still full of racial tension? Are we morally obligated to change our ambitions just because they might be difficult to reach or impossible given the current state of our society?

I can appreciate if someone has a child that is dependent on them or other obligations the strategy changes. Certain sacrifices must be made, particularly when it comes to earning a supporting those who are reliant on you.. But those of us who are able to get by and still repeatedly try to break down the walls we choose to leave standing might not necessarily have the sociological standard course of action. After all, if no one breaks down the walls that are obstacles in our own culture, they will never come down on their own accord. Rather, they will stay as imposing obstacles waiting for someone in the next generation to tear them down. And so, walls are made until someone is determined to make a ruckus and carry through with the demolition process fully.

Dreams are by nature just out of reach, and if they were easy to grasp and lasso down to the floor, would they be worthwhile dreams or just perpetuating the status quo. It is never acceptable to pass on your dreams simply because they are too difficult to accomplish. Difficulty is never a strong enough reason to quit anything.

There was a time when I was very very small, and I did not realize the limitations plastered on the wall. What I did realize was what my dreams were. At about the same age, I would go to sleep and not understand that the things I did after I went to bed and the images that came across my mind were not reality. The next morning I would ask my mom if she remembered flying over the moon with me or dancing with flowers on fairy dust patches. She would look at me and say “That didn’t happen, you dreamed it. It was a dream.” But it all felt so real to me, even after I woke up safely in my bed.

It’s the most vivid dreams, which no one else can see, that inevitably forces you to reach further than anyone without that dream would ever recommend.

Living with a disability is the equivalent of being trapped inside the riddle about a dog, a duck, and a bag of grain. Which all need to cross the river? You can’t leave the duck alone with the grain because the duck will eat the grain. You can’t leave the dog with the duck because the dog will eat the duck. Yet somehow you have to manage to take a rowboat and get all three across.

It was on a day when my life was turning out to be the epitome of this riddle when my mother exploded at me “You need to learn to avoid problems at all possible costs! Why can’t you keep things as simple as humanly possible?” The irony of it was I actually do my best to accomplish just that, but I am somehow extremely unsuccessful at it. When you are trying to navigate through a world which is built for people on two functioning legs and with two functioning hands, the idea of avoiding problems leads you little further than coming out your front door. If you want to avoid the challenges of the world, that is staying inside where it’s safe. If you want to live life to the fullest, you better be prepared for some sort of “choose your own adventure” story with lots of opportunities to see the “Game Over” screen.

I used to think that life was actually about avoiding problems at all possible costs, making the right decisions that would lead to the path of least resistance and easy sailing. But you can’t avoid problems. There is no fairy godmother that can swoop in and make everything OK. Living was only in the confines of a highly accessible house and being certain that all the problems in the world will not come to get you will lead to a highly boring life. It’s the old dilemma of Siddartha, the Buddhist prince who had everything he wanted and yet lacked fulfillment in the world. I’m not sure when my mother said I needed to avoid problems, she meant it to its fullest extent possible. Because avoiding problems means on some level that there are real solutions to every dilemma we face, which can be attained. Some issues are so complicated that they are, on a certain level, unsolvable. The best thing we can do is simply work our way through them.

Life only works when its constantly expanding in every direction. This doesn’t simply mean finding creative solutions to the problems that we encounter, or incorporating some sort of community spirit through living. t means that the problems, the sorrows, the bruises, these too are a part of life and worth working through and worth living for. Even this sorrow, which none of us want to encounter, must be faced fully in order for a life to even begin to have the depth possible and necessary to be rich and full of vibrancy. In return, these problems we encounter and sorrows we must mourn present us with a new challenge. We can either close our hearts and become callous, refusing to go anywhere that hasn’t been protected by some emotional health and safety policy. Or we can take it, all of us that is, for what it ,d recognize that to love it all and to live it all is to put yourself out there and be vulnerable, risking failure heartbreak and the entire boat tipping over losing the entire dock and the bag of grain. But in the end, we live in a world where trading vulnerability and safety inevitably stops not only problems, but living, dead in it’s tracks.

We had been driving in the car for about 45 minutes when I proudly began to explain to my mother what I had learned in school that day. My legs were not anywhere near long enough to touch the floor of the car as I explained that certain letters made certain sounds. For example, the “B” made a “buh” sound. At that moment we pulled up to a stop light and I pointed to a sign and slowly read out: “B-A-N-K. That sign says bank.”  It was the first word my mother had seen me read out loud, and with that, I was on my way.

Now, my parents make it sound like they always knew I was smart. Maybe they did, but I doubt it. Having a child with special needs, it seems to me, has always been an area of great apprehension. What can she learn? What will she learn? How will she learn it?  Will it be enough, or will she need something more in her life that is beyond her mental grasp. The first words that I ever spoke, “shoes” and then “juice”.  My vocabulary doubled in a single day, something that I would later wish could happen again as I was studying for the SATs. But then afterwards, those were the only two words I could say until my mother took me to a speech therapist who ran a number of tests as she did for a great many children entering the early childhood development program. “Whatever you do, don’t speak in baby-talk to her, this one is very intelligent.”

“Intelligent? She says two words, shoes and juice. That’s it.”

“She understands a lot more than you realize.”

From that moment on my parents were never want to use a short word when a long word would expand my vocabulary. They would see other parents cradling their babies in supine and refuse to do so. They read everything they could get their hands on, experimented, and made absolutely certain under no circumstances I would be treated as a sub-normal child. In this way, I was brought up in an educated house. One night my father spent the last two dollars in his bank account to buy a set of used encyclopedias that were published twelve years before.  It was turning the pages of these books, which were older than I was, in a household that refused to stoop to sub normal standards simply because there was a little one in the house, that I acquired my language skills, and, as a result, my self confidence.

Language skills often seem to me as a summation of all you are. Children, of course learning spelling, don’t know this, and adults rarely see. But parents who want the best for their sons and their daughters realize it in full. To use proper language, interesting terms, and changes in words require a certain amount of devotion to reaching beyond your present state. A child with a brain injury, in a special education class, if he dares to read the right books rather than the ones the teacher deems “appropriate” for him can reach exponentially above the low standards the adults around him have set as his goal.  A waiter who refuses to use slang, and refuses to succumb to the standards of “simply a member of staff” may not only receive a higher number of tips, but also be sought after for additional opportunities which would not otherwise come his way if he was just trying to live from paycheck to paycheck without improving himself. The language we use are the building blocks to state who we are, where we come from, how we think of ourselves, and who we intend to be someday. Being someone who simply wants shoes and juice, or bigger goals like someone who probably intends on recognizing the importance of a bank, even at the age of five.

In London, I have a neighbor who routinely plays in our backyard with a best friend.  The two of them share tea parties in a bright pink tent. Yesterday, she ran out to ask my help on a school project about Pluto.

“What exactly do you know about Pluto”, she said, playing with her hair and trying to balance on the outside of her feet. At her age, she still cannot stand still for any length of time.

I thought back to her age, the time when my father would lay down next to me with an encyclopedia and read about any article I liked. I can still picture the ink drawing of Pluto as a ball of ice on the yellow onion-skin pages of our ancient Encyclopedia Britannica. I told her what I knew about orbits and eclipses, Pluto changing places with other planets and how long a year is on a planet that is so far away from the sun, it is only a ball of ice.  I told her everything about it my father had taught me. She smiled, thanked me, and ran back inside.

As soon as I walked through the door I called home to see what my parents were reading these days.

Most of my friends are substantially older than me. They are mostly able to look at my upcoming milestones on from the other side of accomplishment, assuring me that there is life after 30, the trials of my age do pass, and eventually new problems of an even larger sort will replace the ones I face now. When they offer their support it’s wonderful. There are times, however, when their age catches up with them.

For just about everybody I know, life didn’t turn out exactly how they imagined it when there were younger. And for most people in western society, this fact begins to work its way into some form of cynicism which inevitably hardens into some form of jaded stone. Often my friends will look at me, turning their face around suddenly and saying “That’s not how the world works. You have no idea what you’re in for. Don’t dream too big, please…” And I must give them all credit because they are all correct. I have no idea of the challenges which lay ahead of me.

I had a theory that the second give up on your dreams coming true is the very second you start to grow old. All of sudden, once cynicism descends you find yourself living in a world without miracles. Everything is expected or explainable and the magic goes away. Every once in a while I get glimpses of this in my friends as I try to protect my own innocence in believing that the problems of the world will still be fixed, and remain fixable. Ironically, its in their fierceness of protecting me that I see exactly what kind of force I am up against when it comes to breaking the status quo.

To me the protected shrink wrapped life is not worth living, even if it comes without the bitterness of giving up. But I worry that in fifteen years, when I’m the same age as they are, I will have fully succumbed to bitterness because of the curves life will have thrown me. Perhaps my friends are doing a more admirable job of teetering on the edge and maintaining their balance than I will be able to by the time I reach their age. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if my friends are right to put up such walls around me in the name of assisted self-preservation.

Right now all I know is that each day I do what I can to fight the bitterness. It takes actively scraping calloused areas away from one’s heart and running the risk of the sore opening and bleeding fresh. And as the years go on and the inevitable pain returns, it becomes more difficult to willingly stay vulnerable. But if life was about avoiding pain, we’d all be failures. I tend to think that life is about avoiding bitterness, especially when doing so seems very foolish.

Last week, while I was on holiday, Never Walked in High Heels finished its first year of publication. A year ago, a friend said that he read some basic rules for starting an electronic publication and they all recommended the same thing: patience.

I always have thought myself to be a very patient person until about a year ago. Due to my disability, I’m always last in line, waiting for doors to be unlocked, and dealing with my own slowness in daily tasks. If anyone was going to be impatient it was never going to be me. And then I became a working professional. And, if that wasn’t enough, I was working in a world that wasn’t used to seeing people like me work. To top it all off: I’m working in the arts.

Here’s the thing they never tell you during those inspirational movies about crusaders who beat the odds and come out changing the world on the other side of their struggles, there was always a ton of waiting around. If the struggles themselves don’t get you, the waiting game surely will. Take a look at some all time favorites such as My Left Foot. It looks like all the sudden Christy Brown wakes up in the morning and decides to write ‘Mother’ on the kitchen floor. What you don’t see, is the ten years before, when Brown’s mother stared at him wondering what she did wrong, nor do you see the months of laborious and profoundly unclear dictating it took to write the books he’s so famous for. (You also don’t see him choking to death on a pork chop after supposedly being abused by his wife who may have been a lesbian… but hey, even Hollywood has its limits.)

Gandhi’s hunger strikes get condensed to a quarter of an hour. Helen Keller is saying “wa-wa” in the first scene. And William Wilberforce’s twenty years of fighting against the slave trade takes about two hours on film.

I remember once I asked a friend, who was an ex-cop, if crime shows were accurate. He laughed and said, “if they wanted to make it realistic, they’d have to add a lot more paper work and cups of coffee. Nobody would watch it.”

The truth is, I am impatient when it comes to myself, my dreams, and what I want to accomplish. And as I compare my readership this week to what I thought it would be a year ago, I am disappointed. And, if I allow it, I begin to let the waiting game beat me because I’m falling short of my own unreasonable expectations.

A year of Never Walked in High Heels means just under one hundred and fifty essays, two freelance assignments, and a steadily increasing readership. If anyone else accomplished this, I would have said “well done.” Somehow my biggest fault is to want to live in the future, rather than the here and now which will inevitably get cut in the edited version. So when I sit down tonight and, like a good little entrepreneur, sketch our my plan for the next year, I will have to have my roommate hide all the inspirational movies she can find.

It was the last purposeful thing I ever remember my grandmother saying before she was permanently pulled below the waves of dementia. The entire family was gathered in my uncle’s living room, waiting for his last daughter to be married. My mom’s mother had been going in and out of our world and her own for the past several years, but in this moment she was perfectly balanced on the boarder of our harsh temporal planet and her universe where time was cyclical rather than linear. My grandmother turned to me, introduced herself, and then acknowledging the harpist hired to play at the wedding said, “if I had to live my life over again, I would learn to play one of those.”

I think of that statement often when I lay on the sofa in the home of one of my dearest friends and she plays her harp. She is newly married and nesting, the elegant harp looking slightly out of place amongst the used leather couches and prefab furniture. She looks positively angelic as her fingers leave the strings and she straightens her back in a way that shows her immense beauty hidden by her everyday posture. I open my eyes to look at her and for a split second I am jealous of her talent.

“I have got to sell my harp,” she declares walking away from the instrument out of frustration. “Every time I look at the thing in my living room I feel guilty because I know it should be played in a symphony orchestra and not be here to fiddle around with when I feel like it.” She quickly explains that she’s not about to give up playing, she simply wants to sell an otherwise brilliant piece of equipment to someone who could appreciate the music it makes on a consistent basis. She says that as she was learning to play the harp, she always was a disappointment to her teachers who wanted my friend to turn professional rather than play the harp for enjoyment.

And I am instantly reminded of my grandmother’s statement right before a vacant expression overtook her eyes forever.

I often wonder what talents I will regret not sharpening thirty years from now. Sometimes I swear to myself that I will try every activity that strikes my fancy at least once. And then I look at my friend’s harp and my uncooperative hands, a pair of toe shoes, or even the wii at our local pub, and I know such a promise is impossible to keep. The nature of this vast and seemingly endless world is one that might just give you the freedom to race towards all your dreams but it certainly won’t give you the time. Thinking of my grandmother growing up on a rocky hill in the Ozarks, the opportunity to learn how to play the harp was as slim as me learning how to dance en point. And at the end of her life, she still had unrequited dreams which she wanted to announce to someone she thought was a perfect stranger.

My friend begins playing again. For her, as for any of us really, with her talents come great responsibility to use her talents not only to the best of her ability but also with discretion. For her that means selling her professional harp to a musician who will use it professionally. More often than not we take the talents that we do have and, taking them for granted as commonplace, wish we had other skills in our capacity. If something comes easy to us, we tend to think it is easy for everyone and thus unimpressive. For my grandmother, at the end of her life, it was the harpist sitting in the corner of her son’s living room that represented second chances and unfettered dreams. For my friend playing the harp, keeping up her skills is not simply a blessing, but also a burden of responsibility. And for me, my jealously of other skills robs me of my time, so that, if I am not careful, by the end of my life, I will turn to a stranger and say what I would do differently, if I had to life my life over again.

I’m one of the most non maternal women I know. Its not that I don’t like children, its just that I don’t really know what to do with them. Some many of my friends talk about how they were “born to be a mom” or are willing to manipulate their careers so that they can have children and, truth be told, I’ve never been like that. If you were to ask me to phrase my expectation of having children into a economic philosophy, it, like so many of my views, could best be described as laze fare.. If kids happen… they happen and I’ll rebuild my support system accordingly.

The problem is that as an only child, I didn’t grow up surrounded by little ones. A therapist once told my mother to never speak in baby talk around me in order to force my vocabulary to expand. While it worked to some extent, an above average vocabulary had another effect. Other children steered clear of those people who used particularly big words. So between not having siblings and not having an entourage of friends, I grew up surrounded by the language of adults.

I’ve not yet hit thirty and today I decided I do not like the language of adults. When I was young I used to long to understand every word of the grown-up world, the simple statements of my peers seeming flat and almost primitive. They just said exactly what was on their mind, without regard to cadence, alteration, or even tact for that matter. The adult way of speaking seemed so complex and exact. I couldn’t wait to hear that language my entire time.

And then I grew up myself.

Everyday, now that I’m in the grown up world, I see that it is this world that has the barbaric language which lacks imagination and beauty. Scoring high on the vocabulary sections of my entrance exams for universities, the are some leaflets I receive in my mail box which I stare at blankly trying to figure out what on earth the advertisers are trying to say in them. Or the words are unnecessarily large that just the sounds of them slice through anyone who doesn’t have a shell instead of supple skin.

“Patient’s gait is uneven and massively unstable with unpredictable movements and often staccato breathing when fatigued.” I live with the condition and I am not even sure what such an analysis actually means.

Last month I found myself visiting an old friend and her two young boys. They were squirrely and much past cleaning up after them, I had no idea what to do with them. Despite my friend’s aggravation at this fact, I didn’t particularly feel the need to learn what to do with young children. Just let the boys do want they want, and cleaning up after to make my friends life a little easier. I was clearing the table when the youngest boy climbed up on his mother’s lap and whispered in her ear. Intrigued, I looked at my friend.

“He says you walk like a dancer.”