Of course this comes
in various stages – when you go to secondary school or university, when you pass your driving test, when you get yourself into a first class financial screwup and sort it out yourself. Or have your first cigarette, expensive, bad for you but lovely. You have cigarettes, I have a rare YSL or Chanel lipstick because the colours always work for me and I wear them till they are gone.
Growing up goes on and on,
much longer than you expect if you are open to it and I am. You remain so because it is the light in the sky and at least some of the keys to one of the kingdoms. Not shut cupboards – open doors.
News is a fascinating business because there are so many people involved in discovering, packaging and bringing forward issues the rest of us haven’t thought about, don’t know about.“I wasn’t listening” Nigel Farage is quoted as saying which sums up both the enchantment and the danger of Reform – not listening to anybody but themselves.
There are always stories that appeal to you and those you shove away, not of interest. There are what we might call “sleepers” – stories that have been around for ages – like the woman who killed her three children in the US. This has highlighted the isolation, exhaustion and sheer unwellness of multiple early motherhood ie several children under (say) 9.
What I have yet to read about is the husband’s part in all this and how extraordinarily slowly social history changes. This is the week that one of the most committed American feminists Gloria Steinem
died, the end of a life devoted to a life you could live ie not everybody wants to be married, have a husband and have children. Hardly new but clearly still new to some. You and a partner – that’s one thing – but if you are not going to do children well, don’t have them. Wanting them is not the whole story – it’s why you want them. I have sat with men and women who have known from their earliest beginnings that they were not wanted.
Growing up means choosing a version of events to which you can commit. I was brought up to go to work. It has shaped and fed my life and made me grow up. I didn’t set out to have one child, it’s the way things worked out. But I would rather have one with whom I have a relationship of meaning,
still, he 45, me 82 – that’s my growing up, perhaps some of it, and commitment.
Growing up means you can buy all the sleeveless things you like, I can’t wear them they don’t become me and I would always rather have long sleeves rolled up. Even in my recent stay in hospital I didn’t see a woman in a nightdress that became her.
I cheered for the tv critic who lambasted cop shows on tv – choosing is growing up. I would rather switch off the worst tv programming it has ever been – mindless repeats, cop and game shows – and read a book. Or do a crossword, Or go for a walk. Or the clean the kitchen cupboards, anything rather than sit there, glazed, in front of nothing I want to watch.
Growing up involves facing what there is – not what you wish there was. Friendship changes as you grow up.
I have just filed a friend of many years because he can’t do change. It has to be as it was because (a) that’s what he wants and (b) he can’t hack it any other way. It had been coming for 2 years. And it came. One more step on the pavement to maturation.
There is no final point in growing up, you don’t “pass” as in an exam. There is a series of markers where you reflect on steps forward. Growing up doesn’t mean growing old – though that comes to us all. Growing up is the journey and great quote from Elliott Gould it is always now.
Annalog 