I was thinking the other day.
A Facebook friend brought up the idea of death in children’s books, and whether or not that was an appropriate topic for kids. There was a divisive split on the subject, both sides vehemently arguing their view about children and “darker” subject matter. I was on the side of going ahead and exposing kids to death in stories. But it got me thinking — why do I feel that way, and why do some people feel deeply the other way?
I came up with what I think might be a plausable argument.
There’s this tendency in the modern day, especially America, to clean things up. To make everything happy and sunshiny and in bold colors. To tuck away things like grief and depression and death and fear. My experience is that there is a subset of people who see this tidying up, this pasting of happy faces everywhere, and they turn away. They see that it is a lie and that life is not really like that, and they refuse to join in the jollity.
Then there are the people who swallow it whole.
As you might guess from the way I’m framing this, I’m not one of those. I’m not saying that life is a black bowl of gloom and doom and we are all screwed so we should start mourning now. I’m saying that life is a little bit of everything, from the sugary cartoons and pure happy moments to the suicides and depression that really do happen and really will touch you at some point or other. I think we have to enjoy the happy moments when they come, but we also have to be ready for the hard moments. And those hard moments come whenever they feel like it, whether we feel like we’re ready — or the kids are ready — or not.
When I was in fourth grade, there was a girl my class whose mother killed herself. I know I had no idea how to deal with it. But no one else did either. She wasn’t a friend of mine, so I mostly just avoided her, but girls who had been her friends started avoiding her too. After a few weeks, she left the school and I never heard from her again, but for me, that experience really highlighted how important it is for kids to know about these sorts of things. People talk about “letting kids be kids,” but the fact is childhood is the time to learn about being an adult. No, we shouldn’t burden kids with a ton of responsibilities and treat them like adults, but I don’t think we should treat them like they’re stupid, or fragile, or that there’s some sort of mystical “right time” to introduce them to ideas that they will have to deal with as adults.
The same goes for adults. I see a lot of people that do their best to avoid unpleasantness in life, and I think they wind up really unprepared for it when they suddenly can’t avoid it anymore.
I think that this is what people mean when they talk about “authenticity.” Authentic experiences aren’t clean and tidy and happy, they are messy and confusing and dark and happy and joyous and all of that. And I, for one, grow immediately suspicious when an experience is presented as being too clean.
That’s not what I want to offer in my writing. Life is painfully beautiful, but also distressingly ugly, and all the feelings in between. I want to express that. I want to mimic it the best I can, and help people make sense of things that can get hard. I want to offer authenticity, real feelings, real reactions, real situations.
Or as Wesley says to Buttercup: “Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.”
