Did that sentence unexpectedly teleport you to 10, 20, or 30 years ago? Or more?
Back to the good old days of when you’d beg your parent or grandparent or aunt or next door neighbor lady or whoever you could get your hands on to tell you a story from when they were your age?
I mean, everybody’s got to wonder what it was like back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
When I was a kid, that was my favorite question to ask.
Not only was it way more fun to live vicariously through stories of watermelon fights and mushroom hunting adventures, but it also brought a weird sense of “wow, my very adult parent was also once a child like me” to my small-child brain.
Last week I was driving around with the 8-year-old that I nanny for when she hit me with that question like a freakishly strong blast from the past.
“Dana, tell me a story from when you were a kid.”
Honestly, my immediate reaction was, “What the heck, kid, I am a kid.”
But since then I’ve really been pondering it. What are my stories from when I was a kid? I’ve thought about adulthood being different from my childhood in so many ways before (in a truly exhausting fashion, lemme tell ya), but never before in a way that framed it in terms of stories to tell. . . kids.
I want to challenge you, any young (or older) adult reading this—take some time to think about and write down some of your favorite childhood memories while they’re still fresh(ish).
I’m in my very early 20’s and even I was surprised at how hard it was to come up with one story on the spot—and she wanted story after story after story.
Do it for yourself, your future kids, grandkids, and the neighbor punk down the street—write the good stuff down now so you can remember your own glory days in true technicolor, even decades from now.
Act now and you won’t have to freeze when that first young pup inevitably asks you that infamous question—“Tell me a story from when you were a kid!”