FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION

Being young again, living a second childhood, going back years to when you were a kid, enjoying it all over again. Being a kid and sucking your thumb, something in the mouth a sweet candy sucker, some warm milk from a nipple on a bottle, a warm soft lap of a mother, bouncing on daddy's knee, jumping up and down on a bed like it is a trampoline!

Throwing pillows at your sibling stuffed with goose feathers flying all over the bedroom like white snow. Having your own small soft blanket you call "Blanky" and throwing it over your shoulder as you toddle from room to room, spreading your Blanky on the ground and having a pretend picnic in your living room. Dolls invited and wooden train sets built to surround the picnic ground, toy soldiers set up to fight off the enemies, houses made of cards around the picnic grounds like a neighborhood town, setting up more dolls more toy soldiers.

Wondering where your mom is, she is not in the kitchen, daddy has not come home yet. Listening to your siblings screaming and fighting in the next room. Alone with them in a big rich house, a latchkey kid, no one to warm your bottle of milk, no one to play toys with, a huge house with no parents, mother and father went to work, aloneness and isolation as you continue to play, so you play "House" and have a mom and dad dolly, to substitute for an absence of parents, your train set buckles and has a train wreck, your house of cards comes tumbling down and there are no parents in the house to cry with you.

An orphan, a motherless fatherless child, a child without friends to visit because there is no one to drive you to or from their houses, walking home from school and getting beat up by the town school bully. No one to pick you up and drive you to and from school.

A miracle to survive this childhood, to become an adult, to change your adulthood to one that is different than your childhood.

Having a Bat Mitzvah at an older age, knowing the tooth fairy does not exist so brushing your teeth after every meal. Still having your wisdom teeth so being wise enough to know that wisdom comes with the healing of your nightmares, monsters and ghosts, a nightmare of a family without parents, with a hopeful goal of keeping a family together that wants to drift apart.