Recently, my Dad sent me some DVD’s that he had burned from our old Video-8 tapes. There was my ’87 softball season. The time that I dressed up as gypsies with my friend Amy. Me jumping on a Pog0-ball (remember those?) as well as a rather raucous water fight with the boys next door, yours truly donned in a haute couture “Coca Cola” blue & white striped bathing suit. (I was nothing if not fashionable.) And then there was the oldest tape, the 1984 Tea Party at the neighbor’s house, where we dressed up in our Mom’s party clothes, hats included, made tissue paper flowers and ate finger sandwiches with tea.

The best part of that last tape was the ‘fashion show’, where all the 7-year olds grabbed their Cabbage Patch kid and paraded their finery down the deck, spinning and twirling and dolling for the camera. I was wearing my Mom’s blue striped shirt, belted to make it into a dress, and big clogging high heels. I had just lost my two front teeth, and remember that my Mom had painstakenly dried my wavy hair into a perfect straight coif. Everyone was laughing, having a good old time in the company of friends, pretending to be grown-ups with our lilted English accents and pinkie-finger out tea drinking. We were putting on childhood airs of importance, but basically we were just little girls having a great time playing dress-up.

Twenty years have passed since that day, but I often find myself feeling as I did then, that this life I lead is a façade, that I’m nothing more than a little girl playing grown-up. I have a job. I have bills. I have obligations and a house payment and a car payment and animals that depend on me for their nourishment and nurturing, and yet going through the motions often feels like I’m pretending to be something I’m not, someone I’m not. When life is crazy, when all I can do is get up at the break of dawn and go to bootcamp and come home and shower and run to work and work and work and work and eat lunch at my desk and take phone calls and go to meetings and work and work some more and work and rush outta there to go to karate and get home and make dinner and fold my laundry and set my alarm and go to bed, I wonder what happened to that hair-twirling little girl looking to the future, and then I realize – I’m still there.

It’s crazy. We always look ahead – I remember longing to get my ears pierced, looking to the day when I could shave my legs, wear makeup, kiss a boy, go to college, and eventually get married. We spend our days looking ahead, facing the risk that by living for the future we’re missing the present. And still, though I really do love the life I’ve created for myself, I kind of wonder how I got here, feel that I’m not qualified to be a “real” adult, feel that I’m still wearing the proverbial blue-striped dress, whistling through my missing two front teeth.

And though it’s not really the case and that somehow I DID meet all those childhood dreams and goals (minus the marriage thing, of course), I plan on spending my vacation as I did those many years ago, finding someone with which to have a water fight, forgetting my stresses and obligations for the weekend, and acting like the 7-year old that I often feel I am.

I wonder if they make Coca-Cola bathing suits for adults?