Perhaps I am just a bit nostalgic, but in the last few months I have had a lot of time to think about life in general and how things have changed since I was a young girl. We spend a lot of time at the hospital where my father was, and I let everything in my life take second place so that I could spend as much time at the hospital as possible. Even though my father was sedated I sat there for hours just thinking about the times in which we grew up and how things are now so different than it was.
I remember being such a relaxed and friendly child. I loved going to school and I had good friends. Funny enough I am still friends with most of them even though we were in primary school more than thirty five years ago. We were so young and innocent and we were still children. Real children in a sense because we didn't know much more about life than what we learned in school and in books.
We kept ourselves busy reading books and playing games outside. Swimming was one of my favorite activities and I remember that we got up early in the morning to go swimming before school. I wore my hair long in those days, and my mother used to send me to school with wet hair in a ponytail. Nobody looked at me funny or even asked about it because in those days people still kept themselves busy with their own things and didn't stick their noses into everyone else's business.
Far less bullying took place because children were not jealous of each other and we were all just friends. When there was a birthday party we invited everyone. There was nothing fancy about our parties. There were no jumping castles or party entertainers. We had pool parties where we swam, ate cake and played outside. We had no worries in the world, and everything seemed so perfect.
Later on when we were teenagers and we became interested in boys, it was different than nowadays. We were innocent and our boyfriends were merely friends of the opposite sex. We didn't go on dates before we were eighteen and I can still remember how angry I was at my parents for not letting me go out to a school dance when I was sixteen. I know they were only protective and you all know how teenage boys get at that age. Perhaps they were only protecting me from things I knew nothing about.
When I was seventeen, my now sister in law (but in those days my best friend - still is) and I found jobs in a restaurant as waitresses. Our whole lives changed then and there. We were earning money for the first time in our lives and we worked hard. It was like a new world opened for us. For the first time in our lives we were exposed to a more adult world, and it was scary.
To be continued
