AGE and ADULTS: But when do we become grown-ups?
Maturity is so often considered to be synonymous with ‘adult.’ But I truly feel that maturity may be defined by the ability to be both an adult and a child.
Gina Marinello
Anybody looking at a form where I’m required to note my date of birth, can see at once that I’m an adult. But becoming an adult at the official age of eighteen, or in some cases, sixteen, does that make you a grown-up? Deciding when you’ve actually reached this particular status is one, I’ve long suspected, has very little to do with the numbers in your passport.
From time to time, I’ve brooded over the question of when this rite of passage actually occurs. A century or two ago, in what some people once called ‘polite society,’ there were certain demarcation points. A girl was considered grown up when she put up her hair, wore a long frock or went to her first ball. In another culture you might be grown up when you decorated your face with henna, or had a six inch length of bone twisted through your nose or menstruated for the first time.
Nowadays, when would you consider yourself grown up? Is it when you can – legally – buy your first round of drinks in a pub? Or pass your driving test? Or get a credit card? Or vote for the first time? Or is it when you lose your virginity? Or become a parent? In some cases, one event swiftly following the other.
Believe it or not, I can actually remember the moment I regarded myself as grown up. It was none of the above, nor was it when the first of one’s contemporaries married, or far more poignant yet, died. No, I’m afraid it was exceedingly prosaic. I’d just hit my forties, and I was standing in the bathroom, with a lavatory brush in one hand and disinfectant in the other. I found myself muttering, ‘Oh my word, if I don’t do this nobody else is going to! This is what it really means to be grown up. I’ve joined that group at last.’ My Damascene moment had arrived!
Back then, I would probably have defined being, ‘Grown up’ as having to be responsible for some disagreeable task. And maybe, much more worrying, passing into an atrophied state, where no more learning was possible. Just responsibility, responsibility and still more responsibility. Though here’s the daft thing – from early childhood, I was racing to actually become a grown up! I suspect it was probably youngest child syndrome that lay behind it. But leaving aside, the sole-cleaner-of-loos moment, what does being grown up mean at this stage in my life? Or for any of us, indeed?
Well maybe it’s worth considering how you care to define this particular state. Right now, I think it’s a lot to do with things like having reservoirs of patience and tolerance. And learning to become much slower to jump to conclusions about anybody or anything, especially if the prime source of information is second-hand. Plus the realisation that, no matter what age you happen to be or how much expertise you might – or might not – have acquired, there’s always and forever a huge amount to learn.
Personally, I think number-chucking is very liberating. It frees you from the tedious media habit of attaching age to every single mention of a name and what it might imply. We all know the sort of thing, ‘Loulette de Pompadour, 26 and Henry Clatterton-Fontwhistle, 53, are marrying on…..blah, blah, blah. Equally, it can be, ‘Best Beetroot Competition First Prize at Blackton Fete won by Sam Smith, 79 with Jane Jones, 65 runner up.’ It seems as if without age being given, we’re thrown into some sort of fog, where there are no signposts or directions of any kind. Age, I suppose does give a clue but is it important to know that between ‘Loulette’ and ‘Henry’ there’s a wide gap, or that winners at a country fete aren’t necessarily in their first youth?
Thinking back to my earlier thoughts about joining the grown-ups, it’s really much more to do with the way numerical age is linked to expectation than anything else. Frankly, it’s never seemed helpful to me to allow yourself to be defined by a number, and at seventy-seven and rising, I’m still of that view. Equally, expectations have both an upside and a down side. Expectation linked to hope and positivity is clearly good. But expectation of the kind that’s put upon us by others isn’t quite such a great experience. Whether it’s the result of ‘big data’ and endless graphs and statistics, or simply age-related expectations from family or friends, it can be very inhibiting.
Whether it’s a sparky individual who begins a doctorate in Chinese philosophy at seventy-nine, or running a marathon in their eighty-first year, or a child of five who shows signs of playing like a young Mozart, neither should be prejudiced by a number. Nor if the reverse is the case and a ten year old doesn’t necessarily read with unerring accuracy, or a seven year old can’t swim a length. We all develop at different speeds and we all age in different ways.
Other people’s projections of what we should or shouldn’t be related primarily to a number can confuse, inhibit and even harm. Especially in the fields of education and medicine. Whatever age we might be, whether we’re three or thirty, five or fifty, eight or eighty, none of us are statistics. And if compassion is also one of the qualities of being grown up, my two and a half year old granddaughter showed an excellent example of it recently when she accidently dropped a weight on my bare toes!
Nowadays I think joining the grown-ups, if it truly allows you to have the best attributes of an adult, and the equally wonderful ones of a child, is definitely a desirable state. Age is no more than an arbitrary number. However large or small that number might be!