The other night while I was hanging out with my little cousin, Josh, I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He is five years old, but had his answer ready within seconds. “Batman!” he answered, jumping up from his seat on the floor to point to his shirt. It wasn’t surprising that he was wearing a Batman shirt, because he owned approximately 10 of them. I suppressed my laughter and nodded very seriously at him, because it’s rude to laugh when someone answers a question you asked them. His older sister, Allison, who was about to go into first grade, was sitting at the kitchen table playing Life with my mom.
I asked Allison what she wanted to be and she smirked at me, telling me to guess. My brother Jake guessed teacher. Allison said yes. I then filled in that she wanted to be a doctor and an author, an occupation she had added to the list after I told her that was what I wanted to be. I forgot to answer babysitter, because Allison had four careers lined up already. Three out of four wasn’t bad, though. I asked her what she wanted to write her first book about, but she said that she wasn’t sure. “That’s OK,” I told her, “There’s a lot of time for you to figure it out.” And there is.
I asked Josh how old you had to be in order to be a grown up and he told me 100-years-old. When I told him that his dad was only forty, he changed his answer to forty. Then he asked if he would be forty, someday. I told him yes, and he burst into laughter. Allison told me that you only had to be nineteen to be a grown up. This was a biased answer since earlier in the day I had told her I was a grown up, so I could eat dessert for lunch if I wanted to.
There is a big difference between having to be 100 to be grown up, having to be forty or having to be nineteen. My dad likes to say that he hasn’t decided what he is going to be when he grows up. He is forty-six and just about the most grown up person that I know. He can do just about any grown up task that I can think of: income taxes, retirement plans, being Santa Clause, talking to people on the phone.
He’s a grown up, but he’s not done growing up. Being a grown up always seemed so far away when I was a little kid. This phenomenon seemed to carry out along all of the kids that I have met throughout my life, including myself. When I was six, the high schoolers who came to my school to volunteer seemed like they were adults. Going back as a high schooler I felt more like a child than I had being in third grade, because now I knew everything that I had yet to learn. Being a grown up is a relative age, that’s for sure, but no one is ever old enough to stop growing.
