When I Was Your Age, Pluto Was a Planet

I've long since accepted, debunked, and forgiven the lies that were told to me by my mother. Yes I believed in Santa much longer than any kid should. I would literally fist fight with my friends about Santa, how dare they even question his existence. I was scrappy I was. After these fights, I would always pray that my friends would get cornbread and switches in their stockings. Because my mother had told me that if I kept throwing fits in the morning, when she brushed out my hair, that I would be getting nothing but corn bread and switches for Christmas. And even after I stopped believing in Santa, I still held on to the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Since there is nothing remotely scary about a bunny breaking into your house and leaving behind plastic eggs, or a miniature fairy stealing your teeth. Someone once told me that the tooth fairy taught children it was ok to sell body parts for money. Yes she does indeed.

My mother and I never had the birds and the bees talk either, when I asked her at a very impressionable age, “Where Babies Came From?" She simply told me that she had prayed for a blonde hair, blue eyed little girl and that is what she got. This would lead to many misconceptions about relationships with boys until I got much, much older.

These are lies you’d expect to hear from your parents, so I can forgive them. I take about as much offense to these white lies, as I do the the fact that Adam ate the last piece of garlic bread on Friday.

But then there are those lies that society tells us. Truths you held to be self-evident, truths near and dear to your heart since childhood. Things that when you find them to be untruthful, it tears out the little heart of that child that beats within. That is how I felt the first time I learned that Pluto was no longer a planet.

I loved studying the solar system as a child. I had memorized all nine planets long before I even knew why "Uranus" was supposed to sound dirty. Pluto was my favorite, the underdog of the solar system. Plus that really cute Disney dog was named after him. Now Pluto is given the sad little title of dwarf planet and I don’t even know if we are allowed to capitalize the name Pluto anymore (but I won’t ever quit). Apparently, Pluto is actually Neptune's bitch, and to me this all seems very insulting and earth shattering. These “scientists” stole a little bit of my childhood, and I will never look at the world the same.