“There are chips and meat sticks in the pantry for snacks,” my mother-in-law informed me as we settled into the beach house that would be our home for the coming week. “And in the fridge we have orange juice, and string cheese, and purple candy. Purple candy is what we call. . . “
“Red cabbage!” I interjected. “Yes, that’s what we call it in our home too!”
Like my mother-in-law, our family also keeps a jar of shredded red cabbage in our fridge. And for as long as I can remember, the kids have referred to this treat as “purple candy” because it’s such a favorite among every member of our family; we all pop it like candy! I hadn’t realized that my in-laws used this nickname, too. I’m not sure if they learned the moniker from us, or if we got it from them, or if it came from somewhere else altogether. That’s the thing about pet names: it’s hard to pin down their origins. And once they’ve become part of the family lexicon, it’s easy to forget that these terms aren’t universal.
I don’t know if my kids will continue to refer to cabbage as “purple candy” into adulthood, but I have a suspicion that they might. (See also: “messy cheese” for shredded cheese, “yucky water” for sparkling water, and “bum rump” for. . . well, that one’s kind of self-explatory.) The words and phrases we adopt as children tend to stick with us, bolstered by the staying power of early habits and the core memories of youth. I know this from experience: while I no longer refer to diapers as “beebops” (my pet name for them as a loquacious toddler), I can’t hear that word without having images of Pampers swirl through my mind. “Hern” will always mean thank you for me, as it was one of my little brother’s first “words,” along with “hum” for you’re welcome and “Yaya” for yours truly. And Carl’s Jr. will FOREVER be “Happy Star.” You can give a woman an adult vocabulary, but that doesn’t mean she’ll always want to use it.
A few weeks ago, Tsh Oxenreider shared a conversation with her young-adult daughter, Tatum, on the weekly podcast where Tsh invites guests to reflect on their favorite books and spaces. In answer to a question about a favorite place from her youth, Tatum reminisced about a house that their family had lived in during her elementary-school years. In Tatum’s memory the house was magical even though—by Tsh’s admission—it was “honestly nothing special, just your basic suburban house.” What made the house stand out in Tatum’s mind wasn’t the house’s layout or its location or the furnishings, but the memories their family made there—memories of homeschool lessons, and listening to music, and playing in the yard . . . memories that Tatum and her brothers will always cherish.
When Tatum reflected fondly on Christmases in that home, Tsh laughed at the fact that she (Tsh) had ZERO memories of the Christmases they had spent there, and mother and daughter went on to discuss how certain things hold more weight for kids than they do for adults. “I think as adults you forget,” said Tatum, “that you’re just experiencing your adulthood while THEY are experiencing their childhood.” There’s something about childhood that coats those memories with adhesive, memorializing them for decades after they’ve passed.
The conversation has stuck with me. I’ve never been one to take the passage of time for granted, and my children’s youth has always felt precious to me. But in the weeks since hearing Tsh and Tatum’s reminiscences, I’ve been even MORE mindful that these ordinary adult days of mine are far from ordinary for my kids. The way we spend our days now is all that they know—and BECAUSE it’s all they know, they matter all the more. Each day really does have the potential to be an adventure, a milestone, a memory that will linger into adulthood.
The highs and lows my kids share around the dinner table each night might be a blip on the radar of my 42 years; for my kids, the highs are that much higher (and the lows far lower) simply because they’ve had far fewer highs and lows to buffer the extremes. Those seemingly mundane moments matter to my kids, and because of that, I want them to matter to me, too.
The brevity of my kids’ childhoods can evoke a toppling melancholia in me if I let it. Instead of giving into the sadness, I’m opting to embrace this awareness as an opportunity to make the very most of our years together. These are the days of pouring into my children, welcoming every conversation, accepting each invitation to “come and see” because they crave my attention in ways I’ll one day yearn to have back. We’re in our season of developing traditions and saying yes to the game nights and the family field trips and the parent-child dates, because these activities might seem small, but to my kids they are grand adventures that will live on in their memories. It’s a time for filling their minds and hearts with beautiful stories and important truths and edifying words, because they will become the fabric upon which every other story and idea will be stitched.
The window of time I have with my children under my roof is small, and shrinking by the day. I find comfort in knowing that the days within our window are packed with potential. Our family is in our inside joke-making, pet-naming, family-culture-cultivating era, and I’m here for all of it. Especially the purple candy.