Eighteen
Somehow, impossibly, Claire has turned 18.
Last night she said:
When I was a youth - and I can say that now - when I was a youth, I could stay up for nights and nights and nights on end, just youthing. Now I can youth no longer. Adulthood has found me.
Oh, my silly, sarcastic girl, we both know your magic years are upon you.
I think back to myself at 18, when the world was alive with possibility, and I hope so much for her - more than I ever dared to hope for myself. She is so brave, so kind, so insightful. There are days (more than I would like to admit) when I barely feel like an a functioning adult. It’s hard to fathom that I have raised someone who is now, at least legally speaking, an adult as well. I find myself praying I haven’t somehow irredeemably fucked up both of my kids.
I began turning all of this over in my head while she was in therapy yesterday afternoon. Afterwards I took her to get boba and, while I waited in the car, I ran across an article from the April issue of The Atlantic about subjective age - essentially, many of us don’t see ourselves as the age we actually are.
While people under 25 tend to picture themselves as older, people over 40 tend to envision themselves as younger. The discrepancy is, on average, about 20% younger than your actual age. The age may have a particular significance - the death of a loved one, a fork in the road, an accomplishment, or it may be more nebulous.
This idea of the subjectivity of age, possibly even time, has been on my mind lately. A couple of months ago, while Cory and I were cleaning up after dinner, I asked him if he still thinks of our peers as ‘boys and girls’ or ‘men and women’. We both agreed on the former, although the later is obviously the right answer. And again, earlier this week, I broached the subject with my brother, who is 42. Did you think our 40’s would feel like this? He answered in the negative.
I don’t know that I feel significantly older or younger than my 44 years (chaos body aside), but I often find myself surprised that this is what being in my 40s feels like. Maybe I thought that, at some magical juncture in time, I would suddenly have my shit together. Sure, some of my rough edges are smoother, and I’ve gained some insight, but I’m still essentially the same person that I was 25 years ago. Or I've been many different people, but we've all been the same at our core.
I think, for myself at least, the skewed perception has nothing do with what age I view myself as, and more to do with how I viewed adulthood when I was younger. So many of the markers of maturity I was looking to were subjective and even generational. Not to mention that the parts of adulthood that we understand when we are younger are the parts that the adults in our lives allow us to see. My parents were very guarded, and my siblings and I never saw the messy - the humanity - or if we did we were made to understand it as weakness. I hope I’ve done a better job being transparent with my children, that they don’t misinterpret vulnerability and imperfection as weakness. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter what age you are, or what age you identify as, as long as you remain present and open, comfortable with your own inadequacies.
At one point the article quotes Milan Kundera:
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time.
Yes! Yes. And I haven’t read Immortality yet, but I now plan on doing so.
For my part, for today, I will tell Claire this:
Time is a paradox.
It marches forward, unrelenting.
It undulates.
It goes in stops and starts.
It folds in on itself.
Single moments become crystalline while whole years may slip by unremarkably.
And I’ll tell her not to take it for granted, but she will, because none of this will make sense to her until she is older.
Tonight we are taking her out to Haidilao, one of her favorite spots. Kitschy, fun, perfect for a birthday celebration. Maybe it will become one of those crystalline moments. Maybe she’ll barely remember it ten years from now. But I will remember this, all of it, and I will not take it for granted. She will be gone and living her own life so soon.
10:55 a.m. - 2023-09-08