“May you live in uninteresting times.” — Chinese blessing

The Girl is waiting for something amazing to happen.

She hopes one day her closet door will become a doorway to an enchanted kingdom or that a mysterious stranger will knock and tell her, breathlessly, that she and her latent magical powers are the key to saving the world or that she is really a princess and her true identity has been hidden from her to protect her from an evil cult or that her parents are really superheroes and that her own powers will manifest on her next birthday.

She wants adventure. Not a vacation to a foreign country or supervised pony rides. A real, proper adventure with danger and excitement and heroes and villains and magic and saving the world.

She wants it so badly that she clings to the possibility that fairies and Santa Claus and giant beanstalks are real even though she’s beginning to doubt because—in all her seven years—she’s never seen one. So she waits. And the best I can do for her is to provide her with a safe and healthy life, to give her everything I can to make her happy, to teach her and protect her and help her grow.

But I can’t give her mermaids.

She has no way of enabling it, no way of wishing it into existence. She waits, frustrated. And the bubbly part of her filled with wonder and innocence and magic is frozen and chipped away piece by piece, replaced with cold, sharp slivers of reality and sadness every time the doorbell rings and it’s just the mailman.

This is what growing up feels like. And there’s no way to stop it. And my heart breaks a little every time I think about it.