Selfish wankery and other age-defying feats

Today smacking: The assumption of adulthood

For the last six years or so, every single time I have told someone my age, the response has invariably been something along the lines of: “No way! I thought you were a lot older than that!” Since I was young when this started, I thought it was cool to be older. But now? Not so much. Now it’s verging on insulting. So recently I have begun to ask people if what makes them think I am older has anything to do with the fine wrinkles around my eyes brought on by a long youth under a southern sun without sunglasses or semblance of an effective ozone layer. “No,” is always the response I get, and while I know that this is obligatory politeness, I cannot ignore the many responses which go on to say, “It’s nothing to do with your face and how you look; it’s the way you present yourself and the way you speak.”

These days it’s generally agreed – certain religious customs notwithstanding – that there is no set age at which one can decide, “Yes, now I am an adult.” To earn the title you have to act like one, and to keep the title you must continue to act like one, all your life. But far too many adults think that by virtue of being older than 21, 31, 41 – whatever age determines it for them – they are certifiably responsible, card-carrying ‘adults’ whose word is now wiser and more informed than that of people who are younger. This seems to give people license to be the biggest fuck-knuckles on earth; they feel they’ve earned that right by reaching an arbitrary age. Yeah, congratulations; you didn’t die yet. Just like it is cakewalk to conceive a child (for Pete’s sake, you can even do it by accident) but a mammoth undertaking to be a parent, it similarly takes no intelligence at all to grow older, but an enormous amount of self-checking and introspection to be an ‘adult’.

I have a friend, let’s call her Vivica because, well, Vivica is a pretty cool and unusual name – and why do I have to justify my friends’ aliases anyway? – who right now is suffering the kind of mistreatment that makes me righteously indignant. Her suffering is all in the name of, “I’m an adult so I can say and do what I want.” I’ve talked before about good parenting, most notably that a good parent should not be afraid to stand up to their offspring. I guess what I forgot is that a good parent should also act like they were born well before MC Hammer was crab-shuffling across the stage in ballooning pants and Baby had not yet stammered to Johnny Castle that she carried a watermelon.

My friend Vivica is under a lot of stress right now because her mother is, in one particular respect, acting more like an adolescent than her twenty-something daughter. You see, Vivica’s parents divorced about a year ago now. The reasons for the divorce were pretty horrible: apart from her parents not having gotten along for many years, Vivica’s father is an alcoholic, and the emotional and financial strain this was having on the family and the parental relationship finally caused it to break. When the divorce was finalised, Vivica’s parents sold the family home, her mother bought a house not far away, and her father moved back to his home country on the other side of the world.

Understandably Vivica’s mother harbours a lot of anger towards the man who, in her view, broke the family apart and gave her some twenty years of frustration and pain. But equally as understandably, Vivica’s father is still Vivica’s father, and she still wants and needs to be in contact with him. Every woman is, after all, still just a little girl who needs her daddy. But Vivica’s mother’s bitterness towards him and emotional fragility over the whole issue makes it impossible for Vivica to have any semblance of a relationship with her father, even from 17000 kilometres away. Vivica cannot talk about her father, and is forced to call him in secret. This is because at the mere mention of him, Vivica’s mother either spews unresolved rage about him or regresses into emotional infancy, unable to accept the things that have happened.

I realise that divorce is a horrible, horrible thing to happen to anyone and that it takes great emotional toll on all involved. And I also have great, heaping piles of respect for anyone who does make the decision to divorce, knowing that to stay in an unhealthy relationship does nothing but harm to parents and children alike. But when the dust settles, there is still a parent-child relationship here, and despite the fact that both Vivica and her mother are adults, it is still Vivica’s mother’s responsibility – nay, obligation – to show her children that their father is still a man to be respected and remembered. He was, after all, always a loving father to them, and he should not have stripped from him the right to continue to be that loving father.

Vivica’s mother has every right to still be bitter, angry and not-even-close-to-over-it. But to inflict this upon her children is immature, impulsive and a touch selfish. She has not considered that it’s not her daughter’s role to listen while she reflects on how much she both loves and hates her ex-husband. That’s what her fifty-something, married, divorced and everything-in-between friends are for.

Even the impassioned, wilful, watermelon-carrying Baby in that greatest of eighties movies, Dirty Dancing, learns that adulthood has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with how you act and how you deal. There are many subtle tells which indicate to the world that you are an adult, the least of which are those forehead furrows and the grey shadows in the lines beside your mouth which L’Oreal wants you to banish to the seventh circle of hell. Adulthood comes on with subtlety, but you know when it’s there. And you definitely know when it isn’t, or when it has temporarily lapsed like in Vivica’s mother’s case.

It’s a never-ending struggle, to continue to be an adult, and at times we all want to regress back to the halcyon days of childhood, if halcyon they were. But with age comes obligation, and when our immaturity and selfishness is hurting others, it’s time for most of us to take a long, hard look at ourselves. And a few turns with a good therapist wouldn’t go astray, either.