Like a Grown-Up

The ages between twelve and seventeen are what I endearingly call "the ugly years" and mine seemed to last forever. Plagued with acne, braces, glasses, an incorrigibly shiny forehead and a flat chest (I was a late bloomer but packed my undershirt with 2-ply to compensate), the goal of my existence was to pretend that I didn't care. Everything in my "ugly years" was striving toward non-chalance.

It was exactly two years ago that I looked in a mirror and had a revelation of sorts. I was putting the finishing touches on my makeup and preparing for church that Sunday morn when I stepped back from the mirror to examine myself in full. Just then, something (perhaps the expression on my face or the outfit I was wearing) made me gasp and feel spurred to tell my reflection, "I am a grown up." If the world were separated into "Adults" and "Children", I would be on the "Adults" side. I'm not the lanky, greasy-faced twelve to seventeen-year-old anymore; I have breasts (their size does not denounce their presence), a figure, and functional ovaries. I realised that my reasoning had also matured. I'd learned the art of compromise and knowing when to lead and when to follow, I was not any younger than my age said I was.

I grabbed my cell phone and called my mom in California.

"Mom! I just looked in the mirror and I'm really grown up. I look old," I told her.

She laughed, "Miss P., you can't look all that old."

"No, Mom, I seriously look older. I dunno what it is. It's weird. I'm a twenty-something and I look like it," I assured her.

She laughed more. Honestly, I don't know how she deals with me. She is lovely.

I went to church that morning very conscious of my womanhood and the power it carries. Since that day I have embraced each new age in fullness. Growing old doesn't bother me and I'm actually looking forward to the phenomena of grey hair and laugh lines, maybe I'm a rare breed.

Mrs. Maya Angelou said that "if someone shows you who they are, believe them." One of my exes, let's call him Peter Pan, was obsessed with the idea of never growing old. In fact, it was his childish and whimsical nature that attracted me to him in the first place. Mr. Pan would tell me in various ways that he was still a child in need of being taken care of, the thing is he was nine years older than me. He agonised every morning over each hair left in the comb and, for a while, refused to comb his hair at all claiming that he was just "a little jungle boy" when I complained about his wild appearance. I don't know why I didn't take his juvenile antics more seriously.

My guess is that some time before I'd met him he'd had the same revelation I did. One fateful day, he looked in the mirror and saw his face and chest, his broad shoulders and thatch of underarm hair, and felt a shock similar to mine: the sense of surprise that presents itself when changes that occur gradually are finally realised. His experience, however, was different from mine in a very distinctive way. Instead of embracing this evidence of maturity, Mr. Pan rejected it, deciding that emotionally (and in some ways, mentally), he would remain a child and revel in "the ugly years" of non-chalance while his body continued to age independent of his will.

Needless to say, we broke up. Tired of the almost Oedipal structure of our relationship where I was both girlfriend and caretaker, I had to end it. At the time there seemed to be a lot of reasons behind our breakup, I remember spouting them off to my friends, my family, and myself: "Well, he's not very smart. He drinks too much. He has a toxic and addictive personality. He doesn't take things seriously and we can't have an actual conversation without me having to direct his attention away from my chest. He hasn't read a book in I-don't-know-how-long. He doesn't have any long-term, achievable goals. He throws fits when he doesn't get his way... blah blah blah..." The real cause of it is obvious to me now. Back when Mr. Pan was standing in front of that mirror, gazing at the face and body that seemed to reach its age overnight, he made a powerful, unconscious decision that would affect all of his decisions following that moment: he decided to never grow up.

There are times when I look back on certain relationships I've had and give a sigh of relief that goes something like, "Whew! I'm glad I made it through that one!" I chalk them up as experience and add the negative qualities to my "Things I Will Not Tolerate From the Opposite Sex" list, and I grow. I wonder what Mr. Pan does with his past-relationship remnants?

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I stopped those childish ways.
1 Corinthians 13:11