I have been lately in recovery. Or rather, I’ve been in attempt to recover my childhood. Not dredging up memories or sorting family history with the perspective of adulthood. But mining for the pockets of being a kid that made me feel alive. Some call this “childlike wonder.” But I’m not interested in being childlike. I don’t want to diminish the true and real magic of sinking into one’s own imagination in terms of likeness, or in terms of condescension. I am not trying to “act like a kid,” but to be myself. My whole self.

While my Someone was in California last month, I had the house alone for the first time in our three years living in New Hampshire. Our home is a cabin at the end of a dead end street with a thick edge of forest. In the spring, the birds are so loud it’s sometimes difficult to hear one another when we sit on the porch. As summer wrapped, under a moonless sky, I could hear everything. Every shift of leaves under the falling acorns. Every rustle in the woods– a bear? a skunk? a fox? a weasel? (we have them all)– that had me on edge as I tried to play it cool on my porch swing, sipping NA wine and reading a book. Something about the fear, the bumps in the night, took me somewhere else. I texted Annie– “I think something is in the woods?” Intuitively, she Facetimed me right away. We chatted for a good long while, until she said, “Well, do you feel better?” And I did. We hung up and I waited longer, letting the sound of crickets overtake the real-or-imagined bumps in the woods. We had only last week had a bear come and mangle our bird feeders and shepherd’s hooks. I double checked that I had brought the feeders in. I had. And then, I stood up, unplugged the lights, and walked to the front porch steps, and sat down. Above me, the stars were blazing. The dark wrapped me up like a blanket, and I watched as one, two– was that a third?– shooting star passed between the crowns of my trees. I was not afraid of the dark, it turns out. I was afraid to be standing only on the edge of the dark, to be separate, to only stand on the precipice of living rather than saturating myself in the deep of it all.

In Madeleine L’Engle’s book Walking on Water, she writes an entire chapter on the ages we hold within us. When we grow to be fifteen, we still carry our five-year-old self, our fourteen-year-old self, our just-born self. I reference this on occasion, but usually in terms of justifying my joy or explaining my little-“t” trauma. The real point, I think, is that we don’t lose anything by growing older. We don’t lose our ability to imagine, to create, to be fearless and uncritical just by gaining a year and perspective. We are not just allowed, but are necessarily required to call on these younger selves to navigate the world around us. To censor them is to lose ourselves. Which means that to try and recover my child-self– I am not finding something that is lost out in the world, left like a doll on a riverbank– I am simply resting my 39-year-old self and my 38-year-old self all the way back until my 6-year-old self can have the space to move without criticism or restriction. I am not becoming a kid again, I am a kid already. Everyone else can take a nap.

The thing is, when I was a kid, I didn’t think of myself as a kid. Don’t you remember how you bucked and brooded to be left out of adult conversations? To be told you weren’t old enough, that you were too young to understand? I knew in my mighty small heart that I could handle it, that I contained otherworldly knowledge that could not only be trusted, but could be the key to the lock of poor adult judgement. Of course I did– because didn’t I always have to explain to those stupid adults the picture I just drew? The intricacies of story, the Easter eggs planted throughout, the intention behind using yellow instead of red when it was all so obvious to look at? So to be a kid again is not to act with immaturity, but to set forth with utmost confidence, to believe the thing we are born with– that we belong, that we understand, and that we are important.

During my weekend alone, I spent each night on the porch reading. Then I would shut off the lights and look at the stars. I felt the habit growing in me– to look up. It felt like reconnecting. I continued to do so after my Someone returned home. Instead of working until 10, unwinding with a show and calling it a night, I stopped our work at 9:30. Whether he would stop working or not did not deter me. I would sit on the porch, I would be quiet, and I would look at the stars. I lulled my thirties to sleep this way. Then my twenties. And by the time Laurie asked me to come and teach a short bookbinding project for a couple days at the local elementary school, I’d finally found her– the Preteen that would stay up late writing poetry, drawing, and losing time to listening to the same record four times in a row.

The night before my first class, I went to my studio late. I would just put something quick together– a little book for the kids that they would get the point and I could move on and go to bed. But then I remembered what it was like to be a kid. How “kid things” were unappealing. And then I put aside my belief of myself as The Adult Teaching Kids and became a kid. I worked on my little book and 10pm became 11pm. I would miss the porch tonight, but I didn’t mind. There was no music on– just the sound of the crickets outside and of scissors cutting, and of a glue brush swiping across the paper. When it was finished, my Someone had given up and gone to the house, and it was 2AM when I followed.

I cannot remember the last time I fell into a creative portal til 2AM.

I had made a book. But more, I had found something of myself. The class went well the next day, I was still energized from the making. I hardly used the book in the teaching, but it didn’t matter. I am in recovery, and will always be. Because to let my younger selves take the reins is not just an act of discovery or healing, it’s prudent to preserve my well-being. And it’s the living.

This is my little book. It’s about how I felt as a kid to read. Luckily, I am still that kid, and it is also how I feel now.