The Magic Sandbox

My mother and I are pretty different people.

Once she discovered she had a pony-obsessed, dog-whispering weirdo on her hands, she could have tried to bring me around.  Instead, out of either love or a sick desire to make sure I would never relate well to my peers, she fed into my eccentricities.

The best anecdote I can think of to illustrate this observation started with a sandbox.

The sandbox itself was shaped like a giant green turtle.  I think my dad was tired of me digging up the backyard.  With whatever flawed reasoning you retain after having children, he bought the plastic turtle and filled it with sand.  

He didn’t realize that he had also fulfilled every one of my two cats’ fantasies.

I spent many hours in the sandbox with my Little PetShops carefully avoiding the crusty patches. 

The sandbox had been in my life for awhile - I have no idea how long because linear time is meaningless when you’re four - when my mom got a very crafty idea.

One day I was out there managing my imaginary pony farm, when I made an amazing discovery.

My sandbox was a magical gold-producing sandbox.

I started digging like I was in a frenzy.  Among the chunks of hardened cat poop I found nugget after nugget of pure, shiny gold.

If I were a well-balanced child, I would have gone running to my mother to tell her about our new fortune.  But something in my little brain clicked.

It was mine.  All mine.  I had discovered a gold mine and no one could ever know about it or else I might have to do the unthinkable: share.

I dug up the rest of the box and gathered every piece of gold I had found.  I stuffed it all in my pockets and snuck to my room.

I hid the nuggets in my super-secure lockbox (a pink and purple pencil case), counting them out as I went.  I was obscenely, disgustingly rich.

That night, after a few hours of playing quietly in my room - which was already suspicious behavior - I wandered into the kitchen.

With that I quietly went back to eating my dinner.  The questions went on.  She even asked me pointedly how my sandbox was that day (sandy?).  Still I made no mention of my discovery and the hoard in my room.  

As you might have figured out, the “gold” in my sandbox had been planted by my (very creative) mother.  Trying to bring joy into my world, my mom had made two important discoveries:

For whatever reason, my mom kept re-stocking my sandbox with gems.  Maybe she was afraid to break the illusion and damage my seemingly-fragile grip on reality.  Maybe she was so distraught over discovering that I was a tiny Midas that this was her way of giving me more choices to come clean about my presumed wealth.

Either way I amassed an unbelievably large collection of what turned out to be pyrite (a disappointing although healthy discovery I made when I got into geology) and learned a lesson that hasn’t served me well in life:

When life hands you massive amounts of good fortune…