ALL GROWN UP

Anyone who knows me knows that I believe that any day, however it starts, can be the one that changes your whole life. In other words, I believe in miracles. 

So far, especially in the last several years, life has not disappointed me. However, I was not always like this. In fact, it took many, many years for me to
come to believe this.

My Teenage years were definitely not much fun. Like too many Cooks in the Kitchen, I had a lot of relatives telling my Parents, and me, what was wrong with our lives. An incessant drone seemed to follow us around. Whenever they sensed we weren’t paying attention, they redoubled their efforts, before they continued their harangue.

When they weren’t there in person they wrote letters, which at least you could leave unopened for a while. However, in those days, Voice Mail and Call Display did not exist, so you never knew who was on the other end of the phone when you answered it.

The Parochial School system was just an extension of our relatives, our Church and our Community. To this day, I feel that it had its good points, including wearing a Uniform to school. I continue to be grateful for the strong moral and ethical foundation it provided me with.

When your community acts like an extended family, it protects you from life’s hardships and shelters you until you are able to stand on your own two feet independent of it. However, the double edged sword of being a Child, Teenager and Young Adult, is the lack of independence and freedom that you live with throughout your younger years.

In those years, any Adult in the vicinity, particularly in our school, church and community, was ready and willing to act informally in loco parentis. In fact, they felt obliged to keep Children in check.

My first taste of freedom was in University when I realized that my quite small circumscribed world with its rules and strictures seemed almost irrelevant. People around me seemed to be living completely different lives. This was a real revelation to me.

It is not hard for me to understand the recent Television shows about the young Amish Men and Women who get a lot of shocks when they leave their communities. Few of the people I grew up with were ostracised and disowned, nevertheless in my early 20’s, when like so many young people, as I began to make decisions of my own, the Family and Community began to be much less important to me. I felt a great deal freer than I ever had.

I think we learn through our experiences. Along the way, we all make decisions for ourselves and we also make mistakes. Hopefully, we leave a lot of our mistakes, as well as, a lot of the past behind us.

Ultimately however, things happen in life which make us the people we are going to become. Although we don’t realize and appreciate it until later in our lives, much of the foundation of our lives is built under the protective care of our families. This time, and these earlier years, when we are growing up, become the model on which we base our lives.

Our individual experiences after that and the changes are a bit like experiments which help us to find our own identity and place within the world.

It is not until you look back and realize that you have been an Adult for around a decade that you appreciate that you have both survived and become a successful independent human being. Suddenly and unexpectedly you realize that you have been making decisions on your own as an Adult for quite some time, and strangely enough, you are doing fine.

You realize then that there was a reason for all of the growing pains and trials and tribulations, steps and missteps of your formative years. They actually brought you to a place where you potentially can do anything and everything. Conceivably the only thing limiting you is your imagination. The wonder of it all, as a young Adult is the realization that you are just getting started.