Monday, April 11, 2005
When does a person grow up?
At what point do we start thinking of ourselves as -- and more importantly -- acting like, adults? In older literature, there is a clear passage from innocence into experience, and rites of passage mark the entry into adulthood in most cultures. Do we have this in our culture, in our generation? I know one guy whose father took him to a prostitute when he "became a man", a white-trash version of a rite of manhood, and I suppose for most people the first sexual experience is a portal to adulthood. I dunno, it didn't feel that way to me, although my first orgasm (about 3 years after my first sexual experience) felt pretty important, like something had changed.
But in my own life, I can't really remember ever feeling "I'm not a kid anymore". There were some marked events that forced me to recognize my responsibility for myself: travelling with friends, moving out of my mom's home, hosting my own party. Oddly enough, serious things like getting thrown in the hoosegow and having to go to court, or being in hospital by myself, or some worse things, didn't really have the effect of making me feel like an adult; quite the opposite, in fact. Those experiences brought home to me my dependence on others for my safety and happiness, and my inability to do anything more than just survive bad things. I didn't feel as though I'd overcome anything bad, just survived.
Acting like an adult is a different thing from feeling like one, and acting like an adult is not something our culture or our generation values very much. The baby boomers have made a virtue out of eternal childhood, especially for men. It's good for the economy, right? If we never really grow up, we'll keep wanting more and more toys, and never have to recognize the fact that we can't really afford them and might be better off without them. Even having children is sold to us as just another excuse to act like a child yourself.
I think we act like adults when we: apologize; admit mistakes; laugh at ourselves; let our children be children and give them the security of knowing that we will do the worrying, the disciplining, the scheduling and all that non-fun stuff; stop blaming our parents for our shortcomings; recognize our parents were just flawed people, like us; realize that love is always changing its shape, and that love has infinite capacity for expansion.
At what point do we start thinking of ourselves as -- and more importantly -- acting like, adults? In older literature, there is a clear passage from innocence into experience, and rites of passage mark the entry into adulthood in most cultures. Do we have this in our culture, in our generation? I know one guy whose father took him to a prostitute when he "became a man", a white-trash version of a rite of manhood, and I suppose for most people the first sexual experience is a portal to adulthood. I dunno, it didn't feel that way to me, although my first orgasm (about 3 years after my first sexual experience) felt pretty important, like something had changed.
But in my own life, I can't really remember ever feeling "I'm not a kid anymore". There were some marked events that forced me to recognize my responsibility for myself: travelling with friends, moving out of my mom's home, hosting my own party. Oddly enough, serious things like getting thrown in the hoosegow and having to go to court, or being in hospital by myself, or some worse things, didn't really have the effect of making me feel like an adult; quite the opposite, in fact. Those experiences brought home to me my dependence on others for my safety and happiness, and my inability to do anything more than just survive bad things. I didn't feel as though I'd overcome anything bad, just survived.
Acting like an adult is a different thing from feeling like one, and acting like an adult is not something our culture or our generation values very much. The baby boomers have made a virtue out of eternal childhood, especially for men. It's good for the economy, right? If we never really grow up, we'll keep wanting more and more toys, and never have to recognize the fact that we can't really afford them and might be better off without them. Even having children is sold to us as just another excuse to act like a child yourself.
I think we act like adults when we: apologize; admit mistakes; laugh at ourselves; let our children be children and give them the security of knowing that we will do the worrying, the disciplining, the scheduling and all that non-fun stuff; stop blaming our parents for our shortcomings; recognize our parents were just flawed people, like us; realize that love is always changing its shape, and that love has infinite capacity for expansion.
# posted by becca : 1:09 PM
