The Story She Never Stopped Believing
Part One of “The Book, the Hook, and the Boy”—on the story that shaped my wife, and what it means to see her pass it on.
Editor's Note: This is Part 1 of a three-part series on my family's past and present with the story of Peter Pan. At the end of the week, you'll be able to find all three parts here.
The Book, the Hook, and the Boy: Part I
"All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up… and this is the beginning of the end."
— J.M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy
My son held a pink clothes hanger and a Christmas kaleidoscope—accessories for a world only he could see. My wife held a book—a window to a world she couldn't wait to show him.
They lay next to each other in bed, both full of excitement.
"Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last," she read as she neared the end of chapter eight of Peter Pan. "A tremor ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, 'To die will be an awfully big adventure.'"
The gravity of the cliffhanger didn't quite register with my son. He's only four, after all. He had found his way into Peter Pan through "Jake and the Neverland Pirates," the Disney Junior take on J.M. Barrie's magnum opus. My wife jumped at the opportunity to fully immerse my son in Pan. She pulled her special copy of Pan from the bookshelf—the MinaLima illustrated edition with interactive elements. My wife let out an audible gasp and a shrill-but-quiet "no, no, no," when my son ripped the fold-out map of Neverland, but he loved it.
Even with the torn map, she kept reading. As I listened to her, I could hear in her voice the reverence of someone who's been reading a story their entire life—because she has.
She guesses she was about seven when she was first introduced to the Peter Pan story through her dad.
She can't remember if it was the play or the book first. All she knows for sure is her gateway to Pan wasn't the 1953 Disney film, as it is for so many. She insists she read the book before she saw any screen adaptation, falling in love with the character and the story as J.M. Barrie wrote it.
Since then, she's been more than a fan.
Once, during a short layover in London, she convinced her mom to go with her to Kensington Gardens to experience the place where Barrie created the myth and where the famous statue of Peter Pan stands today. And on her only trip to Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween at Disney World's Magic Kingdom, with innumerable costumes to choose from, she couldn't bring herself to dress as anyone else but Pan.
She has Pan shirts, trinkets, decorations, and a Pan coffee mug. When I met her, she wore a necklace with an acorn charm—a reference to the "kiss" Peter Pan gives Wendy in the story.
I've known she loved Peter Pan from the moment we met, but these past two weeks are the first time I've experienced the story alongside her and seen it for what it is to her.
It's not just nostalgia. She doesn't love Peter Pan because it reminds her of being a child—she loves it because it makes childhood feel sacred. As she reads, her relationship with the story almost seems to change in real-time. Watching her read the story to my son is like seeing her passing on a sort of family inheritance. Something she enjoyed with her father, and now her son enjoys with her, like Wendy passing stories on to her own Lost Boy. Where she used to feel longing for her own childhood to never end, now she yearns for our son to stay young, curious, and imaginative for as long as possible.
As parents, it’s easy to miss how quickly our kids grow. It's a beautiful escape to imagine a land where childhood lives forever. And while our son lives in that world now, we know he won't forever.
As my wife and I feel our son's childhood ticking away, I find myself drawn to a character I never thought I'd relate to—Hook, forever pursued by the tick of his own clock. Not because I fear death, but because I fear losing the ability to move, to chase them through the grass, lift and carry them, to be physically part of my children's world. That clock doesn't just chase Hook. It chases me, too.
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Beautiful -- the bond as well as the post!
For us, it's Harry Potter, and we can't wait to introduce our daughter to this magical world.