50 Things I Do and Do Not Miss From Childhood
25 Things I Do Not Miss From Childhood

- Eating my peas
- Having very little privacy
- Going to bed while the sun was still out
- Not having my feelings and ideas taken seriously, even when my whole heart was in them
- The stiff, overly thick, 1970s, corduroy pants that made loud shooshing noises when you walked
- Bullies threatening me with physical violence and following me home from school
- Group showers after Phys. Ed. classes
- Feeling hopeless about The Bomb and praying fervently that the Russians and the Americans wouldn't push the button
- Rugburn
- My mother picking out my clothes
- The feeling of devastation that relatively small events could cause
- Navigating the complex world of female relationships
- Being teased by grownups without any real ability to get away
- Wanting to read far above my maturity level and not being allowed to
- The awkwardness of other children's birthday parties
- Organ lessons
- Being continually supervised
- How much elementary school played out like Lord of the Flies
- Always outgrowing clothes that I loved
- How everything I wanted seemed to be arbitrarily kept away from me by future ages
- Show & Tell in front of the class
- That time I lived in fear of my mother for a few days after I found her collection of what I thought were trophies from her alien kills in the fridge (olives stuffed with pimentos were new to me at the time)
- Loose teeth
- Religion-induced anxiety that my soul might be at stake over some inadvertent sin
- That people gave me dolls as gifts, which I was alternately disinterested in or terrified by
25 Things I Do Miss From Childhood

- Jumping on the bed
- The soft clatter pennies made in my pink, plastic piggybank when I rolled it over the shag carpeting in the hallway
- Cardboard boxes exciting the hell out of me
- Giggling through church while adding "under the covers at night" to the end of every song title in the hymnal
- Bug funerals
- Putting everything in my mouth to taste it
- The deep satisfaction after getting a perfect mark on a spelling test
- That the dentist gave me a sparkly ring after each visit
- How my fingers fit perfectly into the grooves meant to hold cigarettes in plastic hotel ashtrays
- That a garden shed could be the center of whole kingdom
- Climbing up high into a tree to read books
- Rootbeer popsicles
- The feeling peculiar to my mother cutting the tops open on a new set of finger paints
- Lying around in deep states of boredom
- The smell of my grandfather on a cotton pillowcase after he and my grandmother stayed the night
- Wearing my father's old shirts as giant painting smocks
- That lies felt like satisfying stories told well
- Those giant Lip Smackers chapsticks that smelled like bubblegum
- Reading books with a flashlight in the back of my closet where the carpet was still relatively unworn
- The beach ball smell of my rain slicker and a new umbrella
- Playing hard like it was my job
- That everything my future self could possibly be, from a secretary to a heroin addict, seemed like equally dramatic and grand adventures
- Learning to yo-yo while standing on a kitchen chair, because the string was too long and I was too short to do it from the floor
- Hiding nuts in my hair at the lake for the squirrels to find
- Long days stretching out ahead of me over which I had fairly free reign to invent ways to fill them