A place I used to know
I’m writing this in the middle of the night, in what was once my bedroom. I’m surrounded by the furniture I picked out in 1976. I can still see faint smudges on one wall from the tacky adhesive where I once hung a dozen Shaun Cassidy posters. My prom dress is still in one far corner of the closet. The girl who slept in this room almost every night from age 9 through 16 grew up to be me. But she doesn’t exist any more.
Once upon a time, no matter how old I was when I walked in the door, I reverted in two hours or less to the driven teen, the withdrawn adolescent, or the shy and awkward child I used to be. I reacted to criticism by arguing or sulking; I felt I had to prove myself all over again. I found myself asking for permission to do things I do in my adult life without thinking — as though by returning to this house, I was also returning to being a child without the right to make independent decisions. It wasn’t a conscious choice. I just slipped seamlessly, as many people do, into the assumption that if I was in this house, I was by definition under parental authority again, whether I liked it or not.
And I didn’t like it.
The girl who grew up in this room believed that her job was to be the person her parents wanted and expected her to be. That if she disagreed with them, she had to argue or persuade them into agreeing with her, and if she failed at that, that it was her duty to concede. That because they were her parents, she was always required, around them, to be the child. But as I said, that girl doesn’t exist any more.
It’s one thing to be 9 or 12 or 15 and unready to accept the responsibility and power of adult life. It’s another thing entirely to be 22 or 35 or 40 and feel like that responsibility and power is being snatched away, or worse, to feel like you’re obligated to hand it over. The catch, though, is that if you’re 22 or 35 or 40 and you find yourself reverting to childhood around your parents, that’s no longer your parents’ fault. No matter how much they may like it, it’s not your job to go along with it. At a certain point, “growing up” means being willing and able to say, “Topic X is not up for discussion” or “I’m sorry, I won’t be doing Y” or “I realize you’re not comfortable with it, but I’m going to do Z anyway.”
For some of us, that comes naturally. For others, not so much. But it has to come. Otherwise, no matter how much of an adult you seem to be on the outside, a part of you is still sleeping on a twin bed underneath a dozen posters of a long-deposed teen idol.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (6)