Fairy Tales Lost and Found

“Dad, I know.”

Kylee was whispering. I was on my way to work and calling to say goodnight, and I had just asked her about how the day—or,more specifically, that Easter morning—had been for her. When I heard her whispering, though I heard her distinctly and correctly, I asked her to repeat it, because that father’s voice was going off in the back of my head. You know the voice; it’s the one that tells you you’ve just heard something really significant and want reassurance, or confirmation, of either something you know you’ve just witnessed or something you need to hear repeated before you rashly say something parentally stupid.

“Dad, I know. I know there is no Easter Bunny,” she continued. “ I know it was Mom that hid the eggs.”

Thus ended the Age of Unquestioning Innocence for Kylee, and for the second time in our family. I wondered, in a rush of thoughts, if the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus suffered similar fates that day, and would no longer be visiting our home to leave their sprinkling of magic. It was kind of a bittersweet moment. Not only did it mark the end of such things for Kylee and signify she was growing up (despite my protestations), it also meant there would be no more of it in the family, since she is the youngest.

And, in Kylee’s whisper, I heard so many things. I heard a little girl who felt the empowerment of discovery and knowledge. I heard the freedom of being let loose from a child’s fantasy, and suddenly feeling like you belonged to the club of People Who Know Better. I even heard the appreciation of a little girl that knew her parents promoted such fantasies for the enjoyment and enrichment of their child.

With Megan it was about the same age as Kylee, but Megan let us believe our act was working for at least one more Christmas beyond her discovery. The next year, as we decorated the Christmas tree and Kylee was momentarily out of the room, she nonchalantly let me know that she picked up on a neighbor’s kid’s slip-up. I think, for her, it was one of the earliest signals I got that she was declaring herself a more grown up girl, something that I really never wanted to hear. Not then, not now.

As children, we all go through this ourselves. It’s that moment in time where we transition from believing to questioning—usually prompted by that school-age friend that plants the seed—and to finally knowing outright. I even remember it happening at too young an age for me; I must have been seven or eight at the time. I confirmed it by staying up on Christmas Eve, waiting out mom by pretending to be asleep, then waiting for as long as I could before getting everyone up to open gifts. I lasted an hour; it was one o’clock in the morning.

But Kylee’s revelation got me thinking about where it all leads from there, where the pragmatic life begins to intrude on fantasies, and then dreams, and maybe even the simplest of hopes.

Spin the clock back thirty years. We all had hopes and dreams about everything we wanted to do with our lives. It was just the other day that a friend of mine, Don, commented on how “we could take on the world.” The point he went on to make was that we—and I don’t suppose to speak for everyone—didn’t quite hit the lofty expectations we had for ourselves, all those years ago. Yes, some of us are living the dream, or some semblance of it, or a dream maybe a little different than we imagined back then, but still a dream nonetheless. Yet others are living that life somewhere on the sliding scale that ranges from pounding out an existence to comfortable happiness. We make our peace with it, I suppose, in whatever way we can. Sometimes our hopes and dreams rest or rise only in our own mind, or sometimes we attempt to recreate them through the lives of our children. I don't think either case is good.

I remember a point in time in my life where I was on the pounding end of the spectrum. I never planned on being there, my life just evolved to that point. I had long given up any hopes of writing and what it would ever do for me, would mean to me again. I let it go as a pipe dream. I was a father and a husband and I resolved myself to what I saw as the realities of that life; I had to be a provider. I couldn’t afford to pursue dreams that were either risky or low-paying, and so I had to shelve any aspirations of writing, to redefine them as something else that made me more comfortable with setting them aside.

Don’t get me wrong; that life was not an unhappy one, or one where I thought, on a daily basis, about what I was not doing with my life. I never even recognized where I was, what kind of existence I was living. In fact, I found new pleasures in life that helped me feel satisfied. There was much to do, being a father and provider, and I could keep my time filled with the many things with which so many of us preoccupy and distract ourselves. It’s easy to do, this being a good provider thing, as easy as sleepwalking. But it can also get out of hand.

Before I knew it, being a good provider meant the bigger house, the bigger car, the next promotion, the better pay raise. One carrot led to another. We always spent what we had available, and sometimes more. And long ago and far behind me, the hopes and dreams of something else I might have accomplished in my life—not in spite of it, but possibly within it—laid dormant and sleeping, possibly never to be resurrected.

So, as all of the rewards of that kind of life began to unravel, there was a void left, and that made the trauma of the loss that much more difficult to endure. At some point I must have seen it coming, because at the tender age of forty-one, before it was clear where everything was headed, I went back to school to finish that English degree.

That was a frightening endeavor, to say the least. Before starting, I imagined a classroom filled with much younger people, all faster, sharper, and brighter than me. I never was the most diligent student in either high school or in my previous college stint, and so I was not sure I had the study skills necessary to pull it off, or to even prevent me from looking like a fool. But luckily, my first professor in that first course was an incredible teacher and person, and he was both encouraging and helpful. His interest in me and my skills gave me an insatiable hunger for learning, discussion, analysis, and writing. By the time I got to my final year, he was nominating my papers for publication and for presentation at Modern Language Associaion conferences, and I graduated with a 3.98, magna cum laude. Go figure.

And that was how my desire to write returned, even though I still didn’t practice it in the same way I ever hoped. But, it did give me back the faith in myself that I could craft words, and make them useful, thought provoking and interesting. The problem was, I was never going to make any better living out of writing theoretical analysis papers on literature—my talent at the time—than I would by not writing anything at all. So my writing, well, just kind of moved a little closer to the front of my thoughts and didn’t really go anywhere.

That is, until now. Now, I write what I enjoy, in a personal voice, which is the voice at which I was always best. It’s my voice, no one else’s, really. It feels comfortable. It feels genuine. The voice I write with now may never earn me a dime, but I get more satisfaction from it than anything else I have ever tried to pen. So, in a way, my dream is a little more alive now than it has been for many years, which is good.

Maybe one day I will write something else, a work of fiction, from all those reams of notes I have stashed away here and there, and maybe not. Or possibly this voice I enjoy will take me somewhere, become something more than just an exercise in thought and words on paper (or screen). At this point, I feel like I am progressing toward that end and can make it happen someday. If it doesn’t, I have a lot of rewards happening for me right now with what I do, and with what the girls do, and that satisfies me.

Around here nowadays, it seems like we keep dreams not only alive, but thriving. I watch—with great interest—Megan as she launches her Facebook page showcasing her photographic skills, and I am reminded of my interest in photography in years past. She has a talent, that girl, and enthusiasm and ambition to match it. She believes, not only in her talent and in herself, but in all the possibilities that her dream can make real for her. I hope, with everything I have, that her dream will happen for her, and will do so at a much earlier time in her life than it has for me. More than that: I believe it will.

And Kylee: well, Kylee and a friend are putting together a little book of essays they are writing. I can’t tell you just how much that makes me beam. I have no idea if that will eventually end up being her dream vocation, as she has plenty of time for others to take shape. After all, she just ended things with the Easter Bunny.

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.