WHEN YOU ARE ELEVEN, YOU ARE ALSO....

Taken from Sandra Cisneros' short story Eleven....

What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you are eleven, you are also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.

And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday, you expect to feel eleven, but you don't.

You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today.

And you don't feel eleven at all.

You feel like ten underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days, you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten.

Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama's lap because you are scared, and that's the part of you that's five.

And maybe one day when you are all grown up, maybe you will need to cry like if you are three.  That's what I tell mama when she's sad and needs to cry.  Maybe she's feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion, or like the rings inside a tree trunk, or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one....