The last time I was at Disneyland was three years ago with David, when Tov was but a fetus tucked into my womb, his presence only having just been revealed to his soon-to-be parents.
It was our babymoon. We booked a hotel near Disneyland, to which I lugged my new best friend, a giant slug of a pregnancy pillow, and then spent a whole day at Disneyland, grousing about the lines and the crowds. I remember for the first time noticing how many strollers there were at Disneyland. I had previously been completely blind to them, but all of a sudden, I noticed parking areas for strollers, double strollers, four-seat quad strollers, bougie strollers, cheap-as-plastic strollers, rental strollers, everrrrrrrywhere. How had I never noticed the tens of thousands of strollers zipping around Disneyland?
Oh, those were my before-kids days, when my eyes didn’t even register babies, toddlers, or any young children whose heads reached under my waist.
Three years later, I am back to Disneyland, this time with an almost-3-year-old and a 8-month-old, testing out our super-nifty, ultra-lightweight Zoe double stroller for the first time. My last visit to Disneyland, my biggest luggage was my pregnancy pillow and my skincare products. This time, I had two full bags jammed with about a dozen different snacks, water bottles, four extra sets of clothes, diapers, wet wipes, teethers, and God knows what else, and I STILL forgot the kids’ sunscreen.
And man, was I excited! It was Tov’s first ever Disneyland experience! We decided to take him there just before he turned 3– young enough not to have to pay a ticket, and old enough to really appreciate the magic of Disney.
“We’re going to Disneyland tomorrow!” I kept telling Tov the day before, and although the kid had no idea what Disneyland or Disney is, has no idea who Mickey and Donald and Goofy are, he grinned and gleamed as though he knew wherever that was, it was gonna be awesome.
The next morning, we woke him up with excited cheers: “We’re going to Disneyland!”
David dressed him in his favorite T-shirt– a hand-me-down, imitation Lightning McQueen blue T-shirt bought from the Philippines– while I bustled around getting all the snacks and my coffee ready, and then we were off! I was so excited I didn’t even fall asleep on our way there.
Oh, the wonderful magic of Disney! First, we got on the 50-minutes-long “line up to get into the car park” ride. And then, we got on the 15-minute “line up to get on the tram” ride. Then! A “line up for the restroom” ride. And then! The “line up for the security screening” line. And then, dum dum dum, here comes the “line up to get through the entrance” line!
Altogether, it was almost two hours of breathless, thrilling waiting in long lines so that we can line up 40 more minutes for the Astro Orbiter ride, which lasted all of 5 minutes. Is THIS the magic of Disney? We are all magicked into happily lining up for hours and hours under the scorching California sun, grinning and sweating under our Mickey ears, and then leave the park saying, “That was fun! What a great day”
Yes. That’s pretty much how our day went. We spent a small part of our day with my friend Joyce, her husband Tyler, and their sons Cían and Taigh until they left around 2pm, and we chugged on for more than five hours. We rode on a total of four rides. One of them was Pirates, which David was most excited about, except Tov yelled, “I want to go out!” soon after the ride took off.
He loved Astro Orbiter though, and rode it twice– once with David, once with me. It’s this rocket ship ride that lifts you high into the air and spins you round and round, and I HATED every second of it, close to puking and passing out from dizziness. Grimacing, I looked down at my son who was leaning against me, smiling with his mouth open, his hair flailing in the wind, and that redeemed every agonizing second.
After we got off the Astro Orbiter, the ground was still spinning around me, and I felt every ounce of the greasy turkey leg I just ate churning in my stomach like cement in a concrete mixer truck. David tried to take Tov to the Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters, which we know would be so fun for Tov, but he refused, afraid of the dark indoors, too much like Pirates.
So we ambled instead. We got Tov a strawberry ice cream cone bigger than his face– his first real cone!– and while we sat by the sidewalk, watching all the other Disneylanders pass by, he licked and licked and licked his cone until the whole thing was gone into his belly.
Then, because Tov had been asking for a lollipop all day, David caved and got him a cherry lollipop, also the size of his face.
On any other day, I would have gotten very annoyed that we are giving him so much sugar, but I shook it off– eh, it’s Disneyland. There’s only one first experience of Disneyland, and half the joy of Disney is being able to eat all the sugar you want.
Of course, we had to go to California Adventureland, where Tov got to meet his hero, Lightning McQueen, and take a picture with him.
We also got him a set of toy Cars that light up underneath, and oh, the joy on his face! He really doesn’t need more car toys, but really, we bought the set for ourselves– for that momentary, yet eternally pleasing, joy of seeing the delight on his face.
It might have been Tov’s first Disneyland trip, but it was my best Disneyland experience.
I remember the first time I came to Disneyland, I was 12, on a family trip from Singapore to the United States. Back then a Disneyland ticket cost a lot less, but it was still significant, especially for a missionary’s income. I thought it was so magical. I don’t even remember most of the day, but all I remember is how in awe I was of that place, how I deemed it the most magical experience in my life, and to this day, I can still taste the leftover pixie dust from that trip. And I remember too how happy my parents were that day, not because they enjoyed Disneyland, but because they kept looking at our faces, grinning at our grins, excited at our excitement, wondrous at our wonder.
“Did you have fun?” abba kept asking us as the day ended, and each time we nodded happily, he beamed.
And now, full circle, here I am, a mother myself, grinning at my son’s grins, excited at his excitement, wondrous at his wonder, a child again through my child.
I actually did not even mind waiting in line, because that was a rare Tov-and-omma-only time, in which I got to hug him, lift him, spin him, kiss him, for the full 40 minutes we waited in line. I squeezed his hands, still little in my own adult hands, marveling that this boy with a real neck and sweat odor was, last time I was here, a curled, thumb-suckling mystery in my womb.
That chapter of my free, childless days has closed, and then the newborn baby chapter opened and closed, and now here I am, in the last few paragraphs of the toddler chapter, feeling so incredibly thankful and sad at the same time.
While Tov was eating his ice cream and I sat by him, holding Woori and people-watching, I saw an Indian family standing near us. It was an older couple and an old lady in a wheelchair with a long, grey braid, who was, like Tov, licking happily on an ice-cream cone. While we were at Disneyland to treat our child, it was clear they were at Disneyland to treat their mother.
For some reason, that scene moved me. They were enjoying the same moment as David and I, but flipped generationally. For this family, a chapter had opened and closed as well: The chapter of their mother taking care of them had long closed; the chapter of their young parenthood days have also closed; and here they are now, probably with adult children long out of the house, here to relive the Disney magic with their aging mother, before she got too frail for Disney.
I hugged Woori closer to me, as she wobbled on her tippy toes and scratched my face with her sharp tiny nails. She is still a baby now, but the next time we come to Disneyland, she might be a running toddler, and Tov a Kindergartener. And who knows? Maybe one day they’ll be the ones taking David and me to Disneyland in wheelchairs. By then, so many chapters would have opened and closed, opened and closed, each with its dragons and witches, each with its adventures and feasts and magic like this day at Disneyland.
At about 7:30 pm, as both kids started to fade and Tov was no longer running around licking walls and pavements like King Nebuchadnezzar when he turned mad, we got in line to ride the tram back to the parking lot.
In front of us stood a young Arab family, a good-looking couple and their young toddler son. They too were saddled with a stroller and diaper bags and all the goddarn tools a parent needs to keep tantrums and blowouts at bay. As we struggled to hoist all our stuff onto the tram, every one of us weak with exhaustion and overstimulation, the mother commented wryly, “I don’t know why we pay so much to do this.”
But we do it anyway, and we’ll do it again, because that cliche is so true: Time passes so fast. They grow up so fast. And at Disney, time seems to stand still for a day. At Disney, we all turn into a child, from the grey-braided old Indian lady to this young tired mother in a hijab. It doesn’t matter if there are dozens more chapters of our life left, or if we’re on the last chapter— here at Disney, the magic goes on and on, passed from generation to generation.
That’s the magic of Disney.
And as David and I drove back onto the 5 freeway, while Woori shrieked in her car seat and Tov complained that the baby is “too loud,” we looked at each other and said, “That was fun! What a great day!”
Writing for Sophia 