Hey Ma, I'm all growed up!

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much,I f you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
- Kipling

Bearing in mind that Kipling wrote with a Victorian/Edwardian mindset which deemed that the only element of humanity that was worthy of genuine consideration was the masculine side, one can change the last line of the final stanza of his poem ‘If’ to something (that scans badly) to “you’ll be an ‘Adult,’ my ‘son or daughter.’

This consideration of adulthood came about from a discussion we were having this morning in which I was recounting the tale of an acquaintance with whom I was chatting the other day, and he was telling me his sad tale of his separation from his wife, and how he “hoped they would get back together, etc. etc.” I listened sympathetically -- all the while hoping they didn’t get back together. It would be bad for both of them.

His wife is a wonderful person. Very pretty. Very smart. Very loving. She’s a highly caring registered nurse, and she is also a ‘supermom’. And therein lies the problem. She’s by instinct a nurturer. And her long relationship with her “man behaving badly” husband has been that he has never been forced to grow up. Like a good Mom, regardless of his transgressions with booze, other women, unemployment, and so forth, she has always taken her wayward boy back. She has always given him another chance. About six months ago she decided not to. He was left devastated. He was left devastated because she decided it was time for her to act like an ‘adult’ rather than a ‘parent’. He has been left with the option to also be an adult, rather than a child. He doesn’t like that very much. He’s pouting and fretting. Will he succeed? I doubt it. He'll just find another nurterer and then he can be Peter Pan forever.

So, how many people do you know who would genuinely call adults? By adults, I mean genuinely mature people. Look around you. Consider your friends. While they may be adult in years, are they real grownups? What is the mark of maturity? It isn’t a matter of getting a certain number of years under your belt. I have known mature 14-year-olds, and childish 50-year-olds.

In this regard I was struck by an example from the world of showbiz. I was reading in a scholarly journal – OK, Entertainment Weekly – that young actress Scarlett Johansson has in her film career been paired, as a romantic interest, with men of mature years – Bill Murray, Billy Bob Thornton, and 120-year-old Woody Allen. So, compare Ms. Johansson (who is just a baby chronologically) with bimbettes like Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton. See what I mean. Despite the fact she is the same age as the other two listed, her ambience is that of a grownup. She is like Bacall was to Bogey. Regardless of the fact Lauren Bacall was 24 years younger than her husband, they always seemed to be of the same generation in their fabled romance. The lovely Scarlett I find to be similar, so it didn’t seem that weird to see a mutual attraction between her and Murray in Lost in Translation.

As follows is one of the better descriptions of maturity (taken from the Psychology of a Growing Person, 1968) that I have seen:

1. The mature person should not have to deflect his energies into "refighting" childhood battles or nursing old hurts. Maturity can only be built on sound foundations.
2. When a person can live with his past without being bogged down by it, he remains adaptable, capable of continued change.
3. Another characteristic of maturity is the development of wisdom.
4. An important characteristic of the individual who becomes mature is that he is at home with reality.
5. The mature individual cannot look outer reality in the face unless he is prepared to look himself in the face, too.
6. He or she has to be able to love comfortably with his or her own body, whether it be strong or weak, beautiful or ugly, healthy or failing.
7. The person equipped with the human sensitivities that make for maturity will usually have powerful concern with social problems and ways of alleviating them.
8. For all his social-mindedness, for all his savoring of human relationships, the mature individual is not dependent on always having company.
9. To live realistically (which by no means forbids the conscious exploitation and employment of fantasy) means to live in consciousness of one's own mortality.
10. The mature person knows that he has to go on choosing alternatives, that each alternative costs him something, and there are things he will never be able to do and experience. He also knows that there are things he will never be able to do again, that he can never recapture his youth or relive his first encounters with certain experiences
11. He knows that the only real rewards in life come with continued growth, and that there is no room in the one material life he has for major regrets. This individual who has approached maturity can know that he has loved, had done his work, has made his mark on people and, although he wishes there were more time, that he has made the most of what there was.

So, do I see myself as mature? Depends on the day and what I’m doing, I suspect. But, for the most part, I think I am. I think I became an adult (finally) after the breakup of my second marriage over a decade ago. That was when I decided that no form of codependency would dominate my life, and if I were to ever enter a new relationship, it was to be as a complete and whole individual with no anticipation that anybody would bail me out. Two halves do not make a ‘whole’ in terms of relationships, as I had once believed. Two halves make a quarter of a person.

And, as perverse as it might sound, it helped that my two parents were dead by that point, so I had literally (not figuratively) nobody to run back to if I got into any kind of a jam. I was utterly on my own.

That was a good thing in retrospect. Makes a body grow up real quick.

So, I still have my childish moments, but they are more playful than immature (I hope). And yeah, I can rant and rave and give the bird to an offending driver when I am on the freeway. But, mostly I don’t. And mostly I never envy anybody, or resent anybody, or do anything other than basically mind my own business.

I think I’m mature now. Others might beg to differ. But, you know, I think a mark of maturity is also not really caring very much about what somebody else thinks.