When I was six years old, some moms took a bunch of us kids to the Santa Cruz Beach and Boardwalk, which was (in my pre-Disneyland years) my actual, best place in the whole world.
Somewhere in the half-mile of noisy carnival rides and smells there was, in those days, a Fun House that had a tall, indoor "wavy" slide with an undulating surface. You'd buy a ticket and the man would give you a burlap sack to take with you to the top of the slide. It made you go down so fast you'd fly a little over each of the humps. Yes, fly!
With my brother and mother, I had just trudged up from the beach. My brother had his street clothes back on, but I still wore my wet bathing suit, and was covered in sand. We bought our tickets, but the man with the sacks wouldn't let me onto the slide, and pointed to a sign forbidding wet bathing suits.
So my mother (who had my clothes in a bag but didn't want the hassle of shuttling me off to a changing area for just one ride on the slide) tried to badger him to waive this silly rule, which she said should not exist on a ride near a beach, a ride for kids for godssake.
I hated that she did this. That she should argue with a stranger and try to get me to break the rules (I mean, the sign!!!) was mortifying, paralyzing -- I would have gladly given up the slide to make her stop. But then, waving her cigarette around, she came up with the a workaround perfectly solved everything.
She told me to just take my wet suit off. (READ MORE..)
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Anna Runkle is a video producer in the Bay Area, and writes the blog Crappy Childhood Fairy. She recently released an online course, Healing Childhood PTSD, full of accessible, engaging videos and accompanied by a workbook to help adults with ACEs learn to re-regulate brain and emotions, and make big changes in their lives.
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