Growing Older Means Growing Up

I coach an elementary school soccer team and I am daily touched by their childhood innocence and carefree attitude; something that I seemed to have lost many years ago. Growing older is one life’s biggest contradictions. I remember in elementary school my friends and I would huddle together to talk and wish we were like the older girls, the teenagers. We thought wearing make-up and having a boyfriend were the coolest things on the planet. Having your driver’s license was the absolute pinnacle of adulthood. We couldn’t wait for those days to arrive, but until then we passed time with kick-ball games and freeze tag, with basketball and playing outside until it was so dark we could hardly see. We skinned our knees and hurt our elbows and confided all our troubles in our parents over after school cookies. Then we got older.

The conversations we once easily shared with our parents now turn into frequent arguments usually resulting in the slamming of doors and a “why won’t you just leave me alone!” which alternates between meaning “really, leave me alone” and “I’m confused and need someone to talk to, but I just can’t talk to you.” We now realize that the boyfriends we thought were so cool can break our hearts, that mascara runs when you cry and that our drivers license are only good if your car has gas. We aren’t sure if our parents are friends or enemies and we long to go back to when a band-aid and a cookie could fix any problem. One minute we try so hard to convince our parents to treat us like adults, but the next minute we’re whining like a five year old, or watching a childhood cartoon reliving our glory days. We are stuck somewhere between childhood and adulthood and we’re not sure which way we’d rather go. Then we turn eighteen.

Eighteen, right? We’ve waited for this moment for so long — finally able to be on our own, a legal adult. Then why do we feel so lost? We should be so happy about our new found freedom, and we are, but everything is so empty, so up in the air, so vulnerable. We’ve got our entire future ahead of us; we just don’t want to screw it up. As ridiculous as it sounds we just want to curl up in our mom or dad’s lap, have them hold us tight and tell us everything will be all right. We want to return to the carefree days of Kool-Aide drinks and swing sets, of fireflies and PB&J (peanut butter & jelly), but we’ve got so much ahead of us, we can’t turn back now. Whenever we tell younger kids to enjoy their childhood and not be in a rush to grow up, they look at us like we’re crazy. Growing older, it’s one of life’s biggest contradictions.

Jennifer R., 16
Florence, South Carolina

Reprinted from Positive Teens magazine, Volume 7, Issue 6, December 2005

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