Jonathan Dodd returns. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
When I was young and ever-so-slightly more stupid than I am now, I couldn’t wait to grow up. My understanding of growing up was, of course, based on seeing how all those adults around me were able to buy things and go to bed late and drive cars and nobody told them what to do. And they could do all those enticingly and excitingly adult things like smoking and drinking alcohol.
Such things loomed much larger in my innocently pre-adult mind than they did later, when the hideous realities arrived at the same time as the new-found freedoms. Is a freedom constricted actually a freedom? I’m not sure about that.
Still a child in the body of a man
When I grew up at last I realised that I hadn’t really grown up at all.
I was still a child in the body of a man filled with all those childish feelings, longing to be a child again and not having to do all that work and having all those responsibilities, and filled with resentment that my dreams of adulthood didn’t match the reality. And I blamed everyone for pulling the wool over my eyes and not preparing me and letting me down. Especially my parents.
Then I watched, by accident, a TV interview with a very old psychiatrist, one of the last who trained with Freud.
She was a fantastically dry old lady, very frail but with a mind and an eye that could slice any vegetable or loose talk you could come up with, and she still had a vestige of the required Austrian accent for cinema hypnosis. I was hooked.
Forgive your parents
She said something that stopped me in my tracks. She said this.
“In order for a person to become an adult, it is necessary for them to forgive their parents.”
Somehow, those words made me realise that I had been blaming other people for all the things I found difficult to do in life.
It was ‘their’ fault; ‘they’ had failed me and promised me that everything would be wonderful when I grew up and they had lied to me. And it wasn’t fair!
Parents as gods
When we’re babies our parents are, literally, like gods. Without them we would die very quickly. They feed us and keep us warm and safe.
As we grow up they help to train us to cope with the outside world – crossing the road, going to school, taking us swimming, and we like the idea of our independence and begin to resent their control. But we’re glad of the food and clean clothes and presents and time they lavish on us.
In adolescence we need to start becoming independent, so we kick against the traces. We start feeling that our parents are holding us back and limiting us. But we still like the presents and the food and warmth and safety of home.
We remember with embarrassment how we worshipped our parents and we see them now, older and greyer, fallible, out of date but still trying to tell us what to do. We long to get away, but the pull of home and safety is still very powerful, and we even blame our parents for providing that velvet trap.
My parents made me do it!
When we finally escape and make our way out there in life we’re usually too busy or too angry to realise that our parents never promised us that they would be perfect, they never said that they would provide us with everything we wanted rather than what we needed, that they have a life too, and that they did their best. On and on, every minute of every day, they did their best.
Maybe their best wasn’t very good, but who can do better than their best?
Proof of adulthood
Most parents have gone through this, and most so-called adults begin to see their parents as other adults and leave these adolescent aggravations behind. Having children yourself is probably the most effective reality check.
Having said that, I come across enough so-called adults who haven’t actually grown up at all to think there should be some sort of test for adulthood, like the test for citizenship. Perhaps we should have to prove our adulthood before we’re allowed to call ourselves adults rather than just grown-up children.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
Image: L-plate – loopzilla under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license
Image: Shadow and watch – tylerburrus under a CC BY 2.0 license
Image: Parents and child – jm_photos under a CC BY 2.0 license
Image: Adults/baby mixture – daveynin under a CC BY 2.0 license
Image: Smiling graduate – chris_radcliff under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license
