I think of the space children live in. How they move their entire bodies, naturally claiming space without permission or apology. A child can fill a room, a yard, a hallway with their electric bodies and voices – joy unconstrained. Space is their playground, to march or dance around in, to fling their bodies into, jumping and crash landing on overstuffed couches, laughing.

They’d rather strip their denim overalls from their bodies and race shrieking through the spaces between the shooting water lines of sprinklers than sit quiet on a cold floor, socks restraining toes from wiggling, listening to anything but the sound of their own stories and characters inside their heads.

Bring a child into a room and give them one small square of space on the floor; tell them to stop their bodies. Tell them there will be no explosive jumps, no dancing, no wrestling, no fidgeting, no talking, no giggling. No crawling on hands and knees meowing like kittens or barking dogs. No giving into the urge to climb into that imaginary boat behind them to play Pirate, rowing hard to escape the great sharks lurking below.

Tell them only to sit, legs tucked, hands still, mouths shut.

Tell them they are too much, too loud, take too much space.

Tell them to “sit there and be good.”

Never mind that they are happy or that they could teach you a thing or too about freedom or that all that shrieking of their voices competing with each other is really them insisting that you see them. That you love them.

A child contained is unnatural. A child’s voice sealed at the lips, more deeply – at the heart, is unnatural. A child taken in the night under the weight of eerie whispers and rough, pushing hands that smell of anise-scented man’s hand soap, is unnatural.

A child, who is by her very nature a free and spritely spirit, craves to have wings in the space of a living room, the backseat of a car, the leaping between sibling’s beds, a nursery school with slippery floors and bins with sand and water and yellow buckets.

Yank her down and out of that space, force her into the smallness, the pinning down, the boxing up space you insist upon and yes, she can fit in there – her body is small. Yes she can sit still, be quiet, tuck her legs, clamp her tiny hands over her mouth and squeeze her eyes tight because you said so.

But at some point, due to the nature of spritely spirits rising, she’ll break open again and sing, though her voice may be cracked and out of practice. Her body uncurled, legs stretched out, she’ll feel her wings break the skin of her back and one by one the dusty, pretty feathers will spread out and stretch and she’ll fly out of that pen you locked her in, and fling herself into the open, spacious skies above.

-Jenn Forgie