Childhood

Sometimes I feel guilty about my childhood.
I'm always hearing about people's terrible childhoods, about the trauma they experienced because they had six toes or because their parents locked them in their bedrooms and fed them bread crumbs under the door. Or maybe because their parents made them play sports, particularly synchronized swimming, and they hated it.
Okay, so some people really did have hard childhoods -- and I don't want to take anything away from that. I was joking about the synchronized swimming.
But I had such a fun childhood.
We lived in a nice neighborhood, between two other families with kids our age. The kids would spend weekends walking riding bikes down to the market to get Koala soda or New York Seltzer. We'd run between houses, spending entire weekends barefoot, swinging on the neighbors' rope swing, building space ships and dressing our brothers up like girls.
(If I can find a picture I will definitely post it here just to embarrass my brothers who are now grown up and very manly. My youngest brother expressed grave concern yesterday when Big Boy asked, "Mommy, when I get bigger, can I borrow your skirt?" But he forgets that I have photographic evidence of him in pigtails wearing a dress, lipstick and blush. And high heels, I'm sure.)
Anyway, my parents gave us lots of opportunities to try new things. I played soccer and was always volunteering to come out to the sideline. My parents made me finish the season. I played baseball. I could run fast, but pretty much was terrible at baseball. My brothers played football and baseball. They both tried swimming but it didn't stick. They wrestled, too.
Primarily, I danced -- tap, jazz, and ballet. Now that I'm an adult, I realize how much my parents must have sacrificed to pay my monthly dues, pay for costumes, pay competition fees and pay for hotels during competitions. Not to mention the family time they sacrificed going on all the dance and sports trips.
I danced four or five days a week for most of my childhood and had strong friendships and lots of fun with the other dance kids. We always had a blast -- and I'm sure our moms did too -- on dance competition trips. I went with three other girls from my studio to Australia with a national performance team when I was 15.
In high school I became more involved with school friends, and did homecoming activities. I even was on the track team my senior year. My parents let me go to Hawaii with five girlfriends after graduation.
Thinking about it now, I can't believe some of the stuff my parents let me do. Galavanting off to Hawaii at 17 with five girlfriends!?!?! We were all straight-A students and pretty nerdy, I guess, but still...I cringe thinking about my kids, at 8 or 9 or 10 riding their bikes down to the market -- what if they get hit by a car? What if a bad guy gets them? What if they get bullied and another bigger kid steals their money and soda? What if they're drinking too much soda? What if they fall on their bikes? What if they don't know how to ride bikes?
All through childhood, I was a happy kid. I liked my parents (even if my dad was dorky and drove a red truck with a blue camper shell -- one time he drove into my high school to pick me up, and he was wearing a paper bag over his head with a smiley face cut out of it).
I just hope that when my two boys are older, they look back on their childhoods and remember them as fondly as I remember mine. I am grateful to my parents for encouraging us to try new things, to play hard, and to be independent.
I just hope I can do the same in the years to come.