When did you first feel ‘grown up’? Do you remember it as a specific time, or did it happen gradually?
When I was a child, it was a two-word phrase that was used to scold me. “Grow up!” I first remember my dad using it when I was probably seven or eight years of age. He was still saying it the last time I had a conversation with him when I was twenty-four. He never realised just how much time I had spent wanting to grow up.
For most of the twelfth year of my life, I wanted to be thirteen. A teenager was something to aspire to, especially with the expanding freedoms of the 1960s. By the time I was sixteen, I wanted desperately to be seventeen, so I could drive a car. Driving was going to make me into an immediate grown-up, I was convinced of that.
Although a change in the law allowed me to vote when I was eighteen, I couldn’t wait to be twenty-one. That was manhood! Key of the door time. A twenty-one year old was undeniably a man. A grown up. But my twenty-first was something of an anti-climax. It seemed I really had to be twenty-five before my car insurance company would consider me to be a responsible adult, and reduce my high premiums accordingly.
Then I was twenty-five, and got married that same year. I was a married man! Surely that was grown up? But the insurance company didn’t reduce my payments, citing increased costs as the reason to make me keep paying the same amount. Three years later, I was working as an EMT in Central London.
Now I felt really grown up. Driving an emergency ambulance with sirens and flashing lights, arriving at the scenes of terrible accidents and major disasters. It doesn’t get much more grown up than that, believe me. But to my older colleagues, with their additional ten or twenty years of experience, I wasn’t considered to be in the least bit grown up.
Much later, I read about not losing your ‘inner child’. Decades of emergency duties had made me a serious person, someone obsessed with being an adult. I had to try to find that inner child lurking within, or I would be sacrificing a large part of my personality.
It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. But finally, at the age of sixty-nine, I might have found that balance.
I discovered what it means to be grown up.
Hi Pete, I think that if you are the oldest of four you have to grow up fast. I feel like I’ve always been an adult and had to care for other people and I’ve been contributing towards my family’s financial situation since I was 16 and was allowed to work. I sometimes think it would be nice to just not have any responsibilities – just for a day! Smile!
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Thanks, Robbie. I do not envy you that level of teenage responsibility. I was lucky!
Best wishes, Pete.
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π
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So true, Pete. My mother and her friends (all in their eighties) still call me “la nena” (the little girl, in Catalan), and I always remember watching the students a couple of years ahead of us in secondary school and thinking they looked so grown-up, but never feeling like that when I got to their age. I stopped dyeing my hair a while back, but, perhaps because I’ve never married and never had children, I am not sure I’ll ever fall under the grown-up category. Who knows! Well done for finding you inner child, Pete. β₯
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Thanks, Olga. Try not to grow up completely, life is more fun that way!
Best wishes, Pete.
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Pete, I don’t think I really “grew up” until I got into my 40’s. No particular event or events, just that I needed to have that much life experience before I felt I could handle the rollercoaster of life. That being said, I still am a kid at heart and attribute that to my being around as long as I have been.
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Glad to hear that you are retaining your ‘inner child’, Bruce! π
Life is no fun without that.
Best wishes, Pete.
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I couldn’t wait to be old enough to get a passport and go travelling on my own. I think that when you take responsibility for yourself and your actions that is being grown up. My poor daughter grew up too quickly as she took on some of the care for her younger siblings when we returned to England – she was only 9 bless her.
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I was fixated on being old enough to get a driving licence, and wished away many years waiting until I was 17. Your daughter did well to cope with that caring at the age of 9.
Best wishes, Pete. x
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Probably explains why she is such a good child-minder.
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How true. Growing up is a matter of hurry up, hurry up as a child. Then as a teen-ager and young adult, it’s a game of waiting–though we don’t realize it; we think we are already there. That transition from young adult to adult can last for many years.
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Thanks, Pam. The years between the ages of 16-25 seemed to me to be much more than 9 years, more like 15. Then once I hit 45, my life speeded up like an out of control car. With the result that the last 25 years seem to have gone by in an instant.
Best wishes, Pete.
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When I was a child and expressed the desire to be a grown-up, my parents always told me not to grow up too fast.
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That was good advice, Liz. My dad was the complete opposite. He considered me to be ‘adult’ when I was 10 years old.
Best wishes, Pete.
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I don’t take the childhood my parents gave me for granted, believe me!
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I love the posting, Pete! Its true, most time of our lives we can not wait. π Best wishes, Michael
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I am happy that you can identify with this, Michael.
Best wishes, Pete.
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More and more, Pete! π Best wishes, Michael
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I first felt the ‘breeze’ of being a grown up when I was nine, and my grandmother died as I traveled with my mom to make it to grandma ‘in time’ – – nothing to say, and I gazed upon my mom’s stricken face and grief, and didn’t want to ask her for anything – nor was there anything I could do for her to ease her pain, but just sit by, witness it. No help to be had – not big enough, smart enough, old enough to understand what, if anything, could be done. When I felt I fully became grown up? Was nearly 30 years later, when my Dad expressed his wishes, and I waded through them best as I could, knowing, he didn’t have the strength or energy, to be my wise counsel as I explored ways to ‘get what needs be done’ without breaking from my own grief at him soon being gone. Every loss I have witnessed/stood beside, of another, or myself, is the slow working towards the goal of being ‘grown up’ – and yet? I still hope I never, ever, fully ‘grow up’ because, I don’t want to lose the hope of possibilities.
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You sum it up well, TamrahJo. There should always be hope of ‘possibilities’.
Best wishes, Pete.
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For myself? At the darkest, most unknowing times, and yet the very times that bestowed the best gifts, overall? The hope of possibilities was the only thing that kept me going in order to survive long enough to see the gifts bestowed in the dark times.
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I donβt think we ever really grow up but we do mature. That inner child still needs to have fun though. I do believe in personal growth though but itβs connected to self-awareness. Is that growing up? Is growing up based on other peopleβs opinion of you? Are there people out there who we think never grow up? I remember a client telling me I was the most βadultyβ adult she had had ever met. The client meant it as a compliment but it threw me a bit. We were doing work around anger management and raising self-awareness of how individuals react. Hard to know Pete.
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Obviously I am only talking about my own experience here, Siobhain. But I tried for so long to always be grown up, I lost something on the way. Now I am much older, and don’t care so much what others think of me, I have managed to let some of the childish me back into my life. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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Yes!! I think you have to grow up chronologically first. Childhood deep within happens later. It sure did with me. Super post, Pete!
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Thanks, Jennie. The post-war working-class London society I was brought up in was big on being a ‘man’. I had to get away from city life to realise I had left a part of myself there. It took a while for it to come back.
Best wishes, Pete.
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Well said, Pete. Best to you.
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Life is so tricky. We spend all this time wanting to grow up because we know it means future privileges and opportunities (driving, dating, voting, owning a home, etc.) Then one day, the script flips, and we long to be younger again. Oh well, that’s not happening. We might as well make the best of things. You’ve got a few years on me, Pete. I’m 62.
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It took me far too long to stop taking life too seriously. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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When they pinned my paratrooper wings after the 5th jump in jump school.
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I have never jumped out of an aircraft, but I do understand why that moment would make you feel very grown up, Don. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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I felt nearly grown up while attending the first two years of college, and fully grown up during my junior year abroad in Nice, France. I had to find a place to stay, manage my own finances, and be totally responsible for myself in every way.
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I can imagine that living alone in a foreign country will make you feel very grown up indeed, David.
Best wishes, Pete.
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it must have been painful to have those two words thrown at you at a very young age. i believe it is best to have a balance of being grown up while keeping the childlike in you π
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Thanks, Wilma. Things were very different in the 1950s of course. WW2 had made a lot of young men grow up very quickly.
Best wishes, Pete.
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Oh how I love this piece Pete! I can just imagine you as a serious young boy wishing away your youth! So glad you have reclaimed your inner child. I believe that is why I write? She slips in between the lines, likes to hide and seek in the words, I think I can allow her some play? Warmly, C
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Thanks Cheryl. Glad you enjoyed it. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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I felt grown up when I was 22, in a real job, living in my own rental and buying a sofa from Cohn Brothers Furniture for $25 a month which I carried in once a month.
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Buying stuff on credit certainly makes us feel grown up. As long as we have the sense of responsibility to make the payments, as you did.
Best wishes, Pete.
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I think walking into Cohn Brothers with my $25 in hand and going up to the window was the most adult I had ever felt.
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How interesting, Pete, that you always wanted to be older and more mature. I can’t remember ever wanting to be a different age. I don’t think I ever thought about it.
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The you had a fortunate childhood indeed, Robbie. That must have been nice. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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Adulthood is not all it’s cracked-up to be. There’s a heck of a lot more freedom being a child.
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We have to try to find some of that freedom as we age, GP. It’s far from easy though.
Best wishes, Pete.
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Adulthood is overrated, Several of my friends and family tried it and convinced me never to venture there. Warmest regards, Theo
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Glad to hear that, Theo. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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Grown up? What’s that about then? ππ
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Never change, FR. π π
Best wishes, Pete.
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Terrific post Pete
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Thanks, John. I think parents should allow children to enjoy their childhood, not expect them to grow old before their time and wish their lives away in the process.
Best wishes, Pete.
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I feel like I grew up fast after learning of my motherβs terminal cancer. I joined the Air Force right out of high school. I did adult things, but I am not sure I really felt like I had grown up completely. I think the biggest disservice we can put on young people is to tell them to βgrow upβ. I am sorry you had to hear that. I was fortunate to have mentors in business who embraced my desire to learn and helped me reach my potential. Now as the oldest generation in my family, however, I sometimes feel ill equipped to take on the role as the sage advisor and keeper of wisdom. Great topic, Pete. One worth exploring.
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Thanks, Maggie. I don’t have children, but if I did, I wouldn’t tell them to grow up at least until they had a job! π Childhood passes too quickly as it is, especially in the modern world of social media.
Best wishes, Pete.
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really liked this-and feel the same about being grown. <oddly, we spend so much time and energy on growing up-only to find as an adult-we may have discarded too much of ourselves, in our quest.
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Yes indeed, Michele. We now have to find that youthful person inside, and let them out!
Best wishes, Pete. x
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I’m still waiting for that moment Pete π
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Now you have a baby, you have a good excuse to act silly. π
Best wishes, Pete. x
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I think youngsters are always wishing their lives away, and then when we’re grown up we want to go backwards!
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Very true, Stevie
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I spent a lot of time wanting to be older. Then all of of a sudden, I was. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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Well said. This is utterly gut wrenching, and completely relatable.
How many people who have walked this earth could say that they obsessed over adulthood as children, just to see that “perfect” year fly by in a blink?
I am also on a quest to salvage some of that childhood personality that has been burried. Thank you for the reminder to not loose our youthful spirit!πΊ
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It’s never too late to find that inner child. You just have to be brave enough to embrace it. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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While life has been rocky at times, Iβve done my best to hang on to my inner child and I think Iβve succeeded…mostly.
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I think you have done a very good job of that, dear Kim.
Best wishes, Pete.
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π€
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My body may look adult (ok, old) but my mind is still young – long may it continue π
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Glad to hear that, Chris. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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This is a great post full of insights, Pete. When I act silly today, my family wonder what’s gotten in to me. I would love to see what it is you do when you are acting “too young” for your age.
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You never know. One day, you might just see me being ‘silly’, Cindy. π
Best wishes, Pete. x
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I’m still working on it and I think I’m almost there. Another ten years when I’m 80 there will be less people around to tell me to grow up anyway.
Hugs
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Being old means I care a lot less about acting silly at times. It’s a relief. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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Being a grown-up is not all it’s made out to be. I was married and had a child by the time I was 17 so I feel I had the responsibilities of an adult for a long time. But most people think IΒ΄m still 12 and thatΒ΄s Ok with me.
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It’s nice that you are able to stay in the mind of a young girl for your Amanda books, Darlene. π
Best wishes, Pete.
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