Second Childhood

…The term used to discourage those of us who, in the gracious French phrase, have reached a certain age, contradicted by what I read Monday morning that weight lifting (which I’ve practiced for years) actually increases muscle mass in those over eighty-five; and this discovery leads me to reinterpret the phrase itself.

We’ve spent too many words bewailing the sins committed against us in our childhoods, and they were sins, and they had drastic effects, and that matters; but Sunday when I bought this charming “Winter Fairy” at my church’s St. Nicholas Bazaar, I decided it’s high time to enter into my second childhood redefined with exhilaration and hope in this time of deep national and international distress as the men in the world continuing their mass killing.

Winter Fairy expunges the dismal memory of my last doll, the only present I wanted when I was eleven, an age when dolls were officially outgrown, given away, or otherwise disposed of. This doll was a three-foot-tall rag girl I saw in the catalog I poured over for weeks before Christmas. I knew when I proclaimed my wish to my mother that it was not welcome; I was too old for such a thing and indeed had never much cared for dolls being an outdoor girl from the start. But my mother ordered her, and when she arrived, I posed with her leaning against me—she was too tall to cradle—in a photo, long lost, with my parents, proclaiming both my shame and my determination.

She had a big flat rag-doll face, long limp limbs and a nondescript dress; she was not pretty, she was way too big, and I don’t even remember what I did with her, probably threw her in the back of a closet once I’d made my point. Since then I’ve written too many words about the shame of wanting her when I was too old, a shame that recurred later when I wanted something or someone deemed inappropriate until the blessed women’s movement absolved me of all shame—at least in theory if not always in fact.

Sunday I bought my adorable Winter Fairy for a few dollars, made by hand by Elaine Roesle and her daughter and granddaughter in Ohio. She explains that “on a trip to Germany I came across one of these angels in an antique shop. They were made in the early 1900’s. She was my inspiration for my Winter Angel, completely made by hand by three generations of self-taught doll makers” as part of the St. Nicholas Collection.

Now she stands on a little table in my bedroom, reminding me of all the other Second Childhood activities I’ll engage in now that I’ve edited the pages of my next book, Taken by The Shawnee, to be published by Turtle Point Press next June:

• Tramping through snow in the winter woods.

• Refusing the demoralizing effusions of friends who warn me again and again about falling (as though falls are inevitably disabling, which they have never been for me, and I’ve had my share of them.)

• Eating toffee at all hours—the only candy I love.

• Shopping for those bright, useless items: eye shadow, flowers, perfume—but where has my beloved Vent Vert disappeared to?

• Eating all kinds of delicious calorie-laden food.

• And, most importantly, eliminating the people who have troubled me, rousing my “grown-up” sense of responsibility for others, no matter how utterly useless all efforts to repair have proved to be—the “fixing of heterosexual relationships” on which we conscientious and misled women have spent too many days, weeks, and months of our lives.

The Winter Fairy is not worried about such people. She has her mysteries: what is she wearing under her fur coat? I can see the legs of some kind of pajama or long underwear. How does she keep her gorgeous golden curls so artfully disarranged? What is the little lantern or bell she carries over her left wrist? Is she jointed? If I detach her from her base, could she sit down—and would she want to?

“Age cannot not wither nor custom stale her infinite variety”—Anthony’s description of the Queen of Egypt from Shakespeare’s play.

The Winter Fairy is not cursed by infinite variety. She is unchangeable. That’s another prize of second childhood: we don’t have to labor to learn a second or third language, sweat over piano lessons, get on planes to fly to places others want to see but that have little importance for us, arrange get-togethers for soul-eaters (and these are invariably nice people), listen to the complaints of those unfortunate women who have never found any focus for their lives other than a husband now demanding constant care, or (perhaps providentially) dead, re-write wills to make what we leave equally distributed among heirs who will inevitably be angry about it and fight to undo our wishes, dig in the hardened earth to plant spring bulbs (it’s too late anyhow), fuss over giving away our unwanted clothes that we know will go to fatten landfills, attend community events because someone wants us to rather than wintering cozily by the fire—and that’s only the beginning of a list I plan to add to with time. I am satisfied now with learning one new skill: how to repair holes in my favorite sweaters, my inheritance from a man I should never have lived with (I endured it for years) who left me a legacy of moths.

But, having named all these little pleasures of my second childhood, I must set them in the context of the greatest pleasure of my life: writing, every day.

In Women, New Mexico Christmas Favorites of 2023