Who were you at six?

Mark comes home tomorrow after being in Frankfurt for a few weeks. It will be so good to have him back home for a thousand different reasons. I don’t mind the short hops across the pond, but this long one was really long: filled with running around and things to do, sick kids, summer programs, Conclave submissions, house packing, house hunting, and so on. I feel as if a month was squeezed into these weeks.

In the meantime, Maya had her week-long Aspiring Vets summer class, and she *loved* it. I’ve never seen her so happy to come out of school or an activity. My firstborn has been fascinated with animals since she was a baby and has always insisted that she wants to be a veterinarian. Now I certainly don’t expect a 6-year-old to decide her future, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did grow up to be a vet.

This got me thinking about the children we once were.

How much of the 6-year-old child self exists in your grown up persona? What have you held on to and why? What do you long for, or wish you had been able to hold onto?

Time to go and see the presentation of my little aspiring vet.

Have a lovely day.

Published by Valya

Valya Dudycz Lupescu is the author of Mother Christmas, The Silence of Trees, Forking Good, and Geek Parenting. She is also the editor of Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine and the Diaspora, published in 2023 by Atthis Arts. Valya earned her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been published in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Ukrainian American Poets Respond, Kenyon Review, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, and others. Valya has been making magic with words and food for 25 years, incorporating traditions from her Ukrainian heritage with practices that honor the Earth.

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