I Won't Grow Up

When I was a kid, every now and then I would see an example of the mythification of childhood—in a TV show or in some adult cooing about how great it was to be a kid—and I couldn’t understand it. From what I could tell, childhood just plain sucked. You have to fight with your siblings, you can hardly do or get anything you want, you have horrible nightmares—even taking a bath is an ordeal. I wanted to be an adult BADLY. I once made a homemade driver’s license, modeled after my mother’s, and walked around with that and plastic keys. I found it tremendously unfair that kids didn’t have the right to vote. Far from Peter Pan’s stubborn cry of “I won’t grow up” and wanting to be forever irresponsible and carefree, I would have gladly traded in whatever carefreeness I had for the responsibility of adulthood.

All that might seem like a build-up to a sudden shift: that when I DID grow up, I had a sudden desire to regress back to childhood. But in fact, I actually got and enjoyed exactly what I wanted. I LOVE being an adult. I love being able to go wherever I want. I have loads of fun with my brother and sister. My nightmares consist of things like being stuck at work instead of escaping from skeletons.

Of course there are bad things about adulthood: your mind is closing to new skills like languages, you have to work (often at a boring job), you have to pay bills, etc. But sometimes when I pick up my keys and my wallet—these symbols of adulthood that I coveted as a child—I can’t help but be glad that I have the power and independence of adulthood.

But now there IS a shift: unlike my childhood, when I look ahead to the future, I do not find myself wanting to rush ahead and grow up any more than I am now. It’s not just that I don’t want to get old—who does?—it’s that I don’t want the additional responsibility of marriage and kids. But so many of my friends are getting married that I’m literally feeling peer pressure to do the same—and that there’s something wrong with me if I don’t. After all, everyone feels pity for that one aunt who never got married or had kids and instead has an empty life with her dead-end career and her cats.

But in the meantime, I feel like I am, in the words of Miss Jean Brodie, in my prime, and I’m miffed that I have to leave it so soon. I mean, I just got here! Forget childhood; I wish I could stay in my early twenties forever. Oh, sure, they’ve been rocky and confusing—figuring out how the hell to get my finances in order, to get a job and all that crap—but they’ve been FREE—probably the most free anyone experiences in one’s whole life. You have the independence of adulthood without being constrained by responsibility to anyone else. If there were a Never Never Land for 20-somethings, I’d fly there immediately. And I am not familiar with this sensation. Instead of pressing on the accelerator as hard as possible as I’d previously done my whole life, now I’m slamming on the brakes and finding that they’re broken.

Am I just being selfish and just wish to prolong my selfishness? Why not? Women especially have the more drastic shift when children come along: sexual revolution or not, they’re the ones who are expected to—and in most cases even want to—subsume their careers into their children. Why would I want to do this at the exact time my career is finally taking off?

I know the happy mothers out there are nodding knowingly at me. Once when I was a kid, I looked at a sulking teenager and thought: I’ll NEVER be like THAT. And lo and behold, when I became a teenager myself, I became the sulkiest there ever was. You can always count on age, society, and hormones to make certain behavior inevitable. But until the desire to settle down fully takes over, I won’t grow up.