nostalgia wednesdays: naivete

Oddly enough, lately my Venice nostalgia hasn't been raging at quite the same levels it typically does. Instead, I've been steeping in a different type of nostalgia all together. One much harder to articulate. 


I miss being naive. You know, the days when my biggest problems were along the lines of not having as much hair or as many teeth as my toddler peers, and my baby doll was almost as big as me and yet I still had to tote her everywhere (see above). And let's not even talk about my ruffled bathing suit, which only accentuated that diaper situation. 


I miss the days when I didn't realize that there were bigger transgressions in life than hogging the Play Doh kitchen set in kindergarten. The days when I thought the worst thing in the world was my fourth grade boyfriend telling me he loved me. The days when my world was so small that I thought all I needed was a few American Girl dolls, my sister, and a long afternoon to craft endless stories at our fictitious "American Girl Academy."


I still need my sister, my whole family for that matter, but life, as it's designed to do, has gotten so much more complicated. As time seems to have sped along in fast forward lately, I've become increasingly conscious of how totally impossible it is to do everything you want to do. There are so many recipes I want to try, places I want to visit, books I want to read, projects I want to take on, jobs I want to try on for size. 


Being an adult now (whether I like calling myself that or not) is empowering in the sense that I get to decide, to some extent, which things I do and try. But as an extremely introspective person who is prone to fretting, every decision also brings me a sense of mild panic as I close the door, temporarily or otherwise, to the option I eschewed in the process. 


And the scary part is, this is just the beginning, right? The decisions I make right now are constrained mainly by my budget, my work, and my fears. There will be a point in my life (theoretically) at which a significant other's input, budget, work, and fears will also have to be taken in to account. And if he and I decide that our definition of "family" includes kids, that will, naturally, change everything forever. 


I'm not saying it isn't exciting to think about what's to come, whether it's things I try in the LKTC, places I think are worth the fear of flying to visit, choices I make in my career, or people I let in to or chose to remove from my life. 


But there are times when I feel like I have to make one too many of those choices at once.  Times when I'm convinced I can't possibly make the best decision based on the information or timing. Times when I'm fed up, and just want a reprieve from being the lowest woman on the totem pole at work without seeming ungrateful. Times when I want to throw my bowl of plain pasta down the sink and have someone there to cook something different for me for once. Times when I just need to marinate in the bad day. 


When that happens, I let myself, just for a little while, go back to the days of sitting on the floor of the playroom with my sister, where our toughest decision was what outfit to dress our dolls in that day.  


And since I can't actually go back, I bake. Most people leave it all at the gym, or the bar maybe. But I leave it all in the kitchen. Tonight, I leave it all in these ginger spice molasses cookies.