We were in Westport, Ireland, and I was really, really sick. I’m not sure what the illness was, but it hit me like a freight train and I was some stalled truck on the tracks, I don’t even think it tapped the brakes, I don’t think it even saw me sitting there, headlights powered off and me frantically trying to start it up again. After a few days of just absolute physical decimation and headaches that kept me up the entire night, I finally started to rise through the fog of it all and was able to join Sarah for some food, and it was there, in some pub restaurant sitting by a window, that I asked Sarah a question that she immediately laughed at, but it’s a question I’d wanted to ask a thousand times before, only never did. I asked her,
“Do you ever look out, when we’re on these far-away trips, and wonder if people are watching us and thinking ‘where are their parents?! How are they here alone?’”
She responded with an immediate and emphatic No, that she had never once had that thought, and that I was probably way, way too old to be having it myself. Still, I thought to myself, and think it now, I keep wondering that, everywhere I go, everything I do, and I think now I understand why.
I still feel like a kid, if I’m honest, and I don’t think I ever stopped feeling that way.
I mean it when I say this, and I don’t speak these words in some form of hyperbole or comedic inflation, I offer them up because they are the only true words I know to say of this, and I say them because I am hopeful that someone, somewhere, just might agree.
We travel, a lot, a fact you well know by now, and as such Lady G and I are constantly thrust into locations and situations that are both extremely foreign to us, and often extremely far away from home. It should also be said that I grew up with an extremely peripatetic lifestyle due to my father’s job in professional baseball. We moved, a lot, and I spent every single summer until I was 17 years old living somewhere new, knowing no one save my sisters and my folks, and whilst there in that strange new city or town, I would keep traveling with my Dad’s teams, riding in the backs of cheap chartered busses all across the small towns that only minor league baseball could find suitable enough soil for their rookie talents to take root, to blossom eventually if they were lucky.
Knowing this, one would imagine that I am at an unfair advantage for feeling quite at home when not being, in fact, quite at home, and in some ways I suppose you’d be right. Knowing this, however for me, instead makes me almost think it’s because of this childhood, that I still to this very day feel like a child when I am doing what are otherwise very adult things. I always feel like I am probably too young to be sitting in the driver’s seat of a tiny rental car after 26 hours of straight travel, on the opposite side of the road, and then trusted to just simply drive off. Where are my parents? Who is monitoring this situation? Is the onus entirely on Sarah to make sure we actually equipped or mature enough to be doing what it is we’re doing? And yet, we keep doing it, keep turning up in weird places, a rickety cafe table outside Shakespeare’s birthplace, some clifftop in a rainstorm on the far northern coast of the Isle of Skye, a rainforest chasing directly after the insanely spooky roars of howler monkeys, only minutes away from sunset.
We turn up, we pretend we’re old enough to do these things, and as Sarah keeps reminding me, WE ARE old enough, as there are two teenagers living with us that she did, in fact, birth. Still, I say, Still, I don’t think so.
All this got me wondering, and this wondering turned into a shout into the void, as it so often does, leaving me on the shoreline, hoping for an answer that isn’t just my own voice echoed back. What I want to know, from you, from the universe that just constantly expands and makes me feel even smaller than I already do (perhaps this is the true culprit, it’s the universe’s endless expansion that makes me feel always childlike, that’s it!), from whomever is an expert in aging or the maturation of our thought processes or whatever such nonsense could explain it, what I want answered is simple:
Is there a line we cross where we become adults, and actually feel like grownups, or am I fated to always feel like a teenager sent out wandering?
I have heard rumblings, from those who are older than I am and who, to me, seem so much more adult, that this line might in fact exist, and it might just be a tragic one that we’re never ready to cross but must, all the same. The loss of a parent, say most, or worse, the loss of your final surviving parent. This is then, say many, the moment you realize you are the adult generation, the eldest in the line you belong to. Others tell me it’s when you have kids of your own, and perhaps this is why Sarah feels like one, and I do not. Perhaps it’d be different if I raised kids from birth, felt the weight of that responsibility in a more pointed way that being a step-dad doesn’t afford? I do not know this answer, and I am lucky enough to still have both my parents alive, so I cannot answer to the first point either. As such, I stay here, wandering in this place where I do not feel the age I am told I am, I do not feel like I have crossed that line.
Perhaps we can answer this question together, perhaps we can crowd source a definitive solution to the problem. IS there a line we cross? Will we see it, know it to be one and understand that something foundational has shifted? Will we find our age, and feel it when we do? Maybe you know better than I, maybe you who are above me in age, maybe you who’ve experienced things I do not, maybe it’s just a wisdom thing and some of you are wiser than I could ever hope to be. I know not, I just hope someone can answer it.
For now, and for the foreseeable future, I’ll always look over my shoulder when ordering at a restaurant, when boarding a long-haul flight, when sitting in that rental car, or turning up to check into a hotel 5,000 miles away from home, and wonder who is looking at me with incredulous eyes thinking the same thought, WHERE ARE HIS PARENTS?!
I don’t see this shifting, and perhaps this is the primordial soup inside myself from which all the art I ever create is born. This strange feeling of disconnect from the years I know I’ve been here, to the way I feel inside, the cells that will split and regenerate and morph and evolve and crawl out of that soup before finding their legs, haunching over, slowly standing erect, and eventually running off again to some far off place, far away from the things of man.
Perhaps.
Will I see the line,
know it when I cross over?
Will I find my age?
I think, if you are a “responsible kid”, you never really have to grow up. Especially when it comes to travel, adventure, exploring, and learning. Why stop being a “kid”? I’ve lost a parent, been through a divorce, remarried, had a child, was a caregiver to a disabled adult for 9 years, lost a mother-in-law who was like a mother, then lost my husband and became a widow and am now the mother of an almost 19-year-old … but when it comes to most things, at the young age of 47, I still feel like a kid. There are so many things I want to see and do. So many things I want to experience and discover. I truly don’t feel like an adult when I get giddy over some grand adventure, like taking myself to the movies or going to a book convention for the first time ever. I especially get giddy when telling people about my “boyfriend”. I like pretending to be an adult and going on dates. I can surely act like an adult when I need to, but I really don’t feel like one all the time and that is okay! My life is in order, I have a good job, stay out of debt and am putting my son through college. Do I really need to be a real adult when everything is just fine as it is? I never want to lose that sense of child-like wonder and adventure!
At 64, I too, have a boyfriend and it always makes me smile to use that word.
This is adorable beyond measure.
Your first line says it ALL Maureen! I LOVE that. And also, here's to allowing ourselves to feel giddy about SO MANY MORE things than we already do. We don't allow that enough, do we?
Yes! ! I don’t know why. Just ‘young at heart’? It’s when I hear other women talk- I feel somehow that I lack the life experience or outlook that they have and yet I am 57, have raised two kids, am becoming increasingly responsible for my aging parents. Maybe I am just not interested in the same, “adult” things.
Neither am I Laura, neither am I. Not at all not ever.
Maybe this is something that your readers have in common.
I loved this one…. For me, I think that I am temporarily an adult when responsibilities in life in general… are mine…..how I choose to handle those Responsibilitiies???… well sometimes with my child like heart and sometimes with my common sense adult brain! I don’t think we have to “Transfer” over… adulthood is just another part of who we are ….. just like childhood is a part. I will never transfer over, I will remain in my childhood forever in one way or another🥰🥰
Right on the money Marmalade. How you choose to handle the things you must handle determines a lot. I'm glad to know the transfer over doesn't ever "have" to happen, that we can just continue on this way. Phew.
Well Tyler, According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy the answer is “42”.
(don’t forget your towel!)
As you and others may know, I crossed the plane of 50 in February.
When I look at my responsibilities of work and bills and kids aged 21, 23, 27 - I feel very adult.
But I rarely act like it.
“I may get older but I refuse to grow up” is a mantra of mine.
I love hanging with and learning from those younger than I. I find it funny when they come to me and “seek advice”. Who am I to give you advice - I’m still trying to figure this ish out myself.
So I guess the answer is 42 but nah
I LOVE your Mantra Adam. I also refuse, I cannot see a value in acting my age, and I don't plan on trying. 42 though, always the answer. Always 42.
There's a brazillian meme originated in a tweet that said, in free translation: "what the hell am i doing here, i'm only 6 years old?!?!"
and despite being 32, I still feel exactly like that.
losing my dad and realizing I have no support system within my family made me see an adult when I look in the mirror. still, whenever I'm doing anything adult-like i'm stuck in the constant "what the hell am i doing here, i'm only 6 years old?!?!"
I DO TOO! I've never seen this meme, but from now on, I'm using it. Always.
OMG Tyler, can I please tell you how happy I am to hear that I am not the ONLY one that feels this way?? I just turned 55 on the 21st, and still feel like everyone is more adult than I am. I often think of my parents at my age and think how vastly different they were at my age, and how I simply can't comprehend how they were so much more adult than I am. I am constantly looking up to others, much younger than myself, legitimately young enough to be my kids, as more adult than myself. I look to them for advice and assistance. I can't explain it. I wish I could. It's an odd phenomenon for sure, especially for someone that is often told has an old soul, and is very wise. How confusing is that, especially for this kid, stuck in an old lady's body. But there are also those times that I can look at a situation and say, "back in my day...", and some reality sinks in. Those moments are fewer and further apart. Time is a fickle thing. Maybe it is because it is just so much easier to leave it to others to be the adults and make the big decisions. Meanwhile, we can sit back and let them cut up our food into bite sized pieces, and just relax and enjoy.
It's such a beautiful relief hearing that others feel this way too! Also, happy birthday a few days late! I think what you said touches on a big truth...I look at others who were my age when I was young and I just feel like they were so much older, so much more mature. Then I look at me and I feel so far behind that. It's the comparison.
Alanis says, "... I'm green but I'm wise .."
I pretend to be grown up in the situations when and where it is needed. I'm getting Medicare notices already as I am 65 next year. Old enough for Social Security [but not old enough to retire] And when the frell did THAT happen?
I remember sitting in the ER with my husband waiting for him to be seen. [Being very grown up taking care of him and asking tons of questions ... lol. Forever the why and what child] ... I noticed how I was sitting, with a hoodie and leggings on, slouched in the seat, legs open and ready to fall off my chair. I looked like a bored child. Everyone else was all upright and 'proper'. But I didn't change how I sat. I just smiled at myself.
I think we are 'grown up', or mature rather, when we need to be ... but like I mentioned, it's all pretense for me.
I mean seriously, I have battling food toys glued in my fridge because I wanted the inside of my fridge to look like Pee Wee Herman's in his playhouse. I just covered my laptop with Emily the Strange stickers. I have stuffed animal friends all over the house with a weasel [stuffed] that has been given a personality. He talks, for crying out loud!
Age is what we make it. There are those who were adults as children and then there are the adults who 'feel', let alone possibly act, like children. And what of it. As Sheryl Crow sang, "if it makes you happy, it can't be that bad."
Stay young, my friend. I'm sure it's one of the things that Sarah loves so much about you. ... Peace.
Gayle this is so spot on. I cannot imagine what I will feel like when I am where you are. What a wild life this is. Your line, "I think we are 'grown up' or mature rather, when we need to be." Maybe that's it! That's the secret. Be it when we must, don't when we don't. Balance it there.
All I can say is that I felt way more adult at 17 and 27 than I do now in my 30s. I don't believe in linear time and logic so much either.
Fully. Agree. Well said Ellie.
Tyler, this was wonderful! I find it's a strange juxtaposition of maturity and childlike wonder. Most of the time, I feel young and carefree, until the precise moments when I realize I'm the one that has to be the adult. I could say there was a line I'd crossed when my son was born (10 days shy of my 36th birthday), but I actually became more playful in the wake of his birth and in direct response to him, although I had more responsibilities. I could say it was when my dad died 3 years ago and the full gravity of no longer having a parent to reach out to for guidance, made the realization that I'm now the family matriarch so much more real. But, until there are responsibilities to handle, and I do handle them, I want to maintain my childlike wonder, playfulness, and joy as my baseline. I believe the two coexist, although I definitely have those moments when I'd like to defer my responsibilities just because...
Juxtaposition is the best way to describe this place, this position. Perhaps it's the coexisting that is the thing, that it'll always be this way. Maybe there is peace in this.
I’m 46, with a masters degree and years and years of experience in my field and life….i say that all to say most days, I’m amazed that people listen to me. Like am I the official adult now cause I still say fuck ALOT and I still laugh at stupid and dirty jokes. I have moments where I go out with friends and act like we are 21 again and behave just as stupid lol I mean I got grown kids!!! How do I still not feel grown! Maybe it was how I spent my childhood. I had to take on adult responsibilities at 10. Maybe that is what has made me have this adult childhood. Like a second go round but with money to actually have fun 🤣🤣 I don’t know. I think about people who always said once you stop playing you grow old so maybe that’s the answer. Don’t stop playing and really why should we. We only get a finite amount of time on this rock.
Oh I’m a full on boss lady with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities but I have the sense of humour of a 12 year old boy and a tickle trunk full of dress up clothes and wigs just in case the occasion arises to put on a costume! I was looking through old pictures and came across one of my mom at my age and it was so weird that she seems way more like a grown up in that picture than I feel right now! I suppose she would feel the same if she saw a picture of her mother at the age she is now!
Keeping that magic in your life and the sparkle in your eye and LOVE in your heart despite all the things the world throws at you to make us resentful and bitter is the key! Because it’s super easy to see all the crap out there and just let it consume you until you’re a full on “Karen” (sorry to anyone named Karen reading this).
Sure, I have a knee that basically just always hurts, but I still dance with it everyday!
Alas, I am behind on reading these newsletters, but I am finally sitting down today to catch up on all the things. It feels like a treat to always have your emails waiting for me in my inbox.
I love the way you explore this idea and I agree 100%. I still feel like a wandering teenager most days. Was just writing a poem the other day about how I want to keep living with the magic of my teenage heart. I would imagine that having kids or losing a parent would definitely cause a major shift internally. I have not reached either of these points in my life, so I still feel very very young. I think there is something deeply freeing though about being able to just live how you feel rather than worrying about an age "number." We can have the energy, the spirit of whatever age we want. It is a beautiful way to live. It makes life interesting. It keep you curious, able to wonder and dream. My late grandfather was a child at heart until he left this earth. Even as an old man at his assisted living facility he would slide down stair bannisters and skip down the halls singing and dancing like a child. (We certainly had to watch him like a child! 😂) He was always so full of joy and wonder and it was contagious. I love that he lived that way.
I appear to "adult" well from the outside by the way I carry myself and handle my responsibilities. But I definitely feel like a teenager at heart most days. I just turned 30 and there's all these big milestones coming up in the next decade and I hardly feel ready for any of them. When I was young I thought I'd have so much figured out by now. But I still feel mostly the same as I did when I was young! It's definitely hard to comprehend that so much time has passed.