Growing Out

Yesterday I learned that no one grows up. 

The party that my werewolf counterpart previous mentioned was probably the most necessary experience I’ve ever needed to have, because I always forget, for whatever reason, that there are 40 year old people out there who aren’t my parents. 

My parents are 55 years old, but when they turned 40, they forever remained 40.  I still think they’re 40.  They look 40.  They feel 40 to me, and they laugh at me when I tell them that.

But I forget that there is an actual generation composed of actual 40 year olds.  I’m so used to interacting with people who are either my age (ish), or people who could be my parents (i.e. professors, doctors, my parents) that I forgot there are people who were 25 when I was 10 and that they have kids now. 

And this is probably the reason why I’ve been so scared of “growing up”, or whatever.  Because I never saw the transition between 25 and 55.  I would look at my parents in awe – “How did you… get here?  You’re so smart. You have things and kids and an RRSP and you don’t hate me and you know what a mortgage is.” (note:  I don’t know what an RRSP is and I had to spellcheck “mortgage”)

But there is so much life in between!  There are so many years and our 20s and our teens are not these fleeting moments that we will forever long for when they’re “gone”.  We do not shed these years.  We do not lose these years.  Because we do not grow up – we grow out.

We expand and we learn and we build on ourselves as we keep living and moving through the world.  This is why three 23-year-old women can dance alongside 40 year olds to Lauryn Hill’s That Thing, all of them singing along to every single word and knowing every inflection.  They are still us, and we will become them, and it isn’t as scary as we think.

Our experiences are always happening.  I am always the girl that heard that song for the first time and didn’t get it, I am always the girl that gave it another listen and did, and I’m always the girl that will be a mother.  But I’m also always the girl that doesn’t know how to spell morgage mortgage. 

death awaits us

"In [A Confession], Tolstoy related a Russian fable about a man who, being chased by a monster, jumps into a well. As the man is falling down the well, however, he sees there's a dragon at the bottom, waiting to eat him. Right then, the man notices a branch sticking out of the wall, and he grabs on to it, and hangs. This keeps the man from falling into the dragon's jaws, or being eaten by the monster above, but it turns out there's another little problem. Two mice, one black and one white, are scurrying around and around the branch, nibbling it. It's only a matter of time before they will chew through the branch, causing the man to fall. As the man contemplates his inescapable fate, he notices something else: from the end of the branch he's holding, a few drops of honey are dripping. The man sticks out his tongue to lick them. This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we're the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach."

Excerpt from The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Euginides