Life Change

Ever since I could remember, I’ve felt younger than everyone around me.  It’s an eerie feeling to know in years, I’m the same age as everyone around, but I feel like a kid on the inside.  Like, something within my core, never matured.  It was like my body grew up, but my heart and mind didn’t.  I’m not sure when that line became blurry.  I’m pretty sure this life change happens to everyone.  That maturity and adult acceptance occurs. For me, it just wouldn’t come. I hated it.  Why couldn’t I be the age everyone else was. Why couldn’t I be an adult.

I think, I’m not alone in feeling this way.  Perhaps no one else talks about it.  Like I had the world by the tail, and I was cool, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be this way any longer.  Even years after my children came along, I felt like I wasn’t the age I was physically.  Like my brain got stuck on eighteen.  I was nearing thirty, when something snapped.  Suddenly, I was distructible, breakable.  I struggled with this realization for several years, until finally, something unthinkable occurred.  I became something very different. I began to worry about what I would fix for supper, what I would say at the parent meetings, the baseball games.  I was telling my kids, “because I said so, that’s why.” and other things I had hated hearing growing up.  Oh my goodness, I was becoming my mother!  What the heck was I gonna do about this dilemma?  I grappled  with this plight.  What a horrible thing to have happen, becoming one of the very individuals that had said and done all the things I had said I wouldn’t!  This became a tug of war internally.  I began to push against it.  It would push back.

One day, after foundering with this inner demon, I realized something:  You’re not your mother, because she has become something very different too.  As we were aging in our respective bodies, we were both transforming into different individuals.  I was not becoming my mother.  I was becoming what my mother had been.  Was that okay?  I don’t know.  But acceptance came.  Were all my inner wars over?  No, but one hurdle that I never thought I could accept, had been defeated.  I had become an adult.  Might I add, really not a bad one.  After all, I turned out okay.  I guess if I had to go through this life change, If I had to become anyone, the person whom had such a huge role in my life, wasn’t such a bad selection.  I had become an adult.  I had succeeded and failed.  I had failed at not becoming the adult, my mind had said was evil.  I had succeeded in becoming an adult.   I had become my mother, and it was okay.

This is three of Folk Lifestyle weekly journal/blog challenge.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 4

Week 5

 

 

Love Y’all!