yesterday i watched the barbie movie with my friend and, naturally, we wanted to dress up for the occasion.
as i sifted through my closet, i was hit with the realization that i simply don't own pink clothes anymore.
as a young girl, pink was my favorite color.
shirts, jackets, dresses, accessories - you name it. along with my love for disney, princesses, hello kitty, and of course: barbies.
i was blessed to have a barbie dream house and remote-controlled pink corvette in my collection of toys gifted over several christmases and birthdays.
i remember making little stop-motion videos of my dolls playing house or school and diy-ing more items for them to enjoy.
i never drew on them with marker or cut their hair in obscure ways.
and i'd like to think they took care of me too.
when we were really young, my sister and i were very close
- back when being young meant your sibling was your best friend and spending time with them was free of conflict and true misunderstanding.
once we reached the age where our interests began to diverge and early indicators of the versions of ourselves we would eventually grow into finally emerged, i suddenly felt alone.
i remember at this initial shift, i had coped through my dolls
- too young to articulate how my first encounter with the realities of growing up made me feel.
i can finally give it an earnest shot.
growing up is thinking your sister hated you because she didn't want to play dolls with you anymore, then realizing it was just because she was discovering other things in the world to be experienced.
it is thinking your sister didn't love you anymore because she stopped saying it and no longer let you hug her, then realizing it was just because there are other ways to express you love someone.
growing up is realizing you actually had a beautiful childhood
-that the things that forced you to mature too soon had obstructed vour memory of what it felt to be a kid.
because you grew up with an older sister and both your parents
and even had two grandparents in the house.
you celebrated birthdays and christmases and had gatherings with extended family where you got to spend time with multiple generations of family members.
growing up is realizing that on average, parents have eighteen years with their child.
that's 18 birthdays, summers, and holidays together before you leave and truly embark into the real world.
and that is a shorter amount of time than we realized while we were living through it.
growing up is realizing that that was why it was difficult for your mother to release you from her embrace when you left for college.
growing up is acknowledging that you could've expressed more gratitude, could've complained less or acted less annoyed when your mother wanted to take photos of and with you.
growing up is realizing the depth of the quote from the film:
"we mothers stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they've come."
growing up is realizing how similar you are to your mom and finding more and more parallels between you and her as you get older.
growing up is looking through the photo albums on your mom's facebook page because she uploaded most of your childhood memories there and realizing you inherited your love for documentation from her.
it is realizing you should take more photos with your family while you still can (and having a genuine desire to do so) because you understand now how sacred time is and how precious they are to you.
to grow up is to realize the concept of growing up.
as we get older, time feels as though it passes faster because we become increasingly conscious of its value and its loss.
it is to grieve the past versions of ourselves while simultaneously stepping into our next one.
growing up is watching the barbie movie and its message piercing like a needle through the fabric of your adulthood, its thread coated with bittersweet nostalgia.
but it does not damage you with its puncture.
as if tickling your inner child to wake it,
reminding you of how it felt to grow up as a young girl playing with her barbie dolls.
it is crying at the movie theater with absolutely no shame.
it is smiling at the young girl and her mother in the row in front of you when you walked in the theater and seeing the lone elderly woman in the row behind you who also sat through the credits, for you all came to watch the same film.
it is walking out in your skirt and the pink hair bow your friend let you borrow to take selfies with the movie poster before grabbing food for the post-movie debrief.
it is getting a message from a family member who happened to be at that same mall, and her coming by with your niece whom you haven't seen in years to say hello.
it is realizing she is ten now.
it is remembering when she was born.
remembering playing with her as she grew into a toddler.
it is remembering that you gave her and her sister your dolls once you 'grew out of them' at a certain age.
it is then remembering that you left your three-story barbie dream house in the trash room when you moved out of the apartment you grew up in because it was too big to conveniently give to them, and had a lot of missing or broken parts by then.
it is having a memory of the house with its layer of collected dust and not remembering what happened to the pink, remote-controlled corvette.
it is wishing you had kept at least one doll.
it is realizing the same thing applied to your childhood clothes: given to younger family members, donated, or (for the really worn-down pieces) simply thrown out.
growing up is realizing why you don't own pink anymore.
and it is wanting to go and change that.
(Credit: @cam.casi on TikTok)
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