When did all my friends become adults?
The question came to me the other day for no particular reason. Perhaps it was prompted by yet another (happy) announcement of a friend's new addition to the family, or the steak dinner with a mate in Manhattan two weeks ago where the conversation centered - as it mostly does these days - on couples, kids, and careers. Was it that long ago that our lives were consumed by markedly more adolescent activities, I wondered? Don't get me wrong. I don't miss the days when hooking up was more on our minds than, say, buckling up the kids in the back seat or optioning up our stake in the company. But when - exactly - did this cataclysmic change occur, and why didn't we throw a party to celebrate the momentous occasion?
Perhaps because it didn't happen so much as it's still happening, one stage at a time. Adulthood, I've come to believe, is - like life - a journey not a destination.
I used to think that the transition from adolescence to adulthood was accomplished through one seminal event - not unlike a metaphysical border crossing where one moment you're in one state and suddenly you're in the next. As I got older (notice that I didn't say 'old'), I came to realize that adulthood and adolescence are as much states of mind as they are concrete life stages. In both instances, the graduation from one to the other is more likely achieved in steps - milestones, if you will - that mark our development and maturation as individuals.
Defining 'adulthood' is difficult, not to mention subjective. I'm reminded of the parable of a judge who, when asked to define 'evil', responded: "I don't know what it is, but I recognize it when I see it." Adulthood is not like evil, but it is equally mercurial to define yet intrinsically familiar to all. We won't necessarily all agree about what constitutes being an adult, but perhaps we can find consensus about what it takes to get there. In pondering this question (I may have too much time on my hands, I know), I humbly propose the following 7 Milestones of Maturity.
(Why seven, you ask? Good question. For one, it felt right. For another, it sounded nice. Since Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effectively People, 7 has been the ultimate lucky number for lists, so who am I to mess with success? Seriously, I came up with seven because these seven spoke to me ... )
1) Monogamy
The decision to be exclusive to a partner - especially for a male - is possibly the first concrete step an adolescent takes towards adulthood. For one, monogamy implies restriction and limitation of choice; the act of closing off possibilities is in and of itself a milestone of maturity. Selecting one person over another introduces you to the idea of opportunity costs - that every decision brings with it the realization that you have to give up something to have another. This is a hard but important lesson to children, heretofore accustomed to having their cake and eating it, too. What's more, monogamy also serves to reveal the significance of sacrifice - of postponing short-term pleasure today for greater benefits tomorrow. Finally, fidelity forces you to make a commitment to your partner, which is also a novel experience for most young people. Dedicating yourself to someone for an unspecified amount of time is, for many, their first exercise in trust, faith and future. In illustrating the concepts - and costs - of choice, sacrifice, and commitment, monogamy is a critical first gate to adult experiences.
2) Mortgage
If monogamy is about making a choice and committing to it, assuming a mortgage is all about taking on responsibility. Whether we fully realize it or not at the time, buying a property, and going into managed debt to do so, brings with it real world consequences. No longer are our lives - or more precisely, livelihoods - entirely our own. A bank owns a majority of our home, and holds a lean against all of our future earnings until we repay it back fully. Accepting and embracing this reality requires a measure of fiscal sanity and sobriety that is inconsistent with adolescence, where money conceivably grows on trees - or at least out of our parents' pockets. Moreover, a mortgage is a personal (as opposed to communal) commitment; this is not a burden one can share, absent a spouse. The responsibility of a mortgage serves to restrict - for many of us for the first time - the range of our possibilities. Life suddenly has limits, and a commitment made in such a way is not easily nor painlessly broken. While monogamy may have acquainted us with the concept of choices, mortgages present us with its' corollary - consequences. It is in realizing the ramifications of our decisions that we add an important measure of maturity, and take another step towards 'seniority'.
3) Marriage
The act of getting married is, for many, the ultimate rite of passage. Perhaps more than any other milestone on this list, it is almost universally recognized as the moment when a father's daughter leaves the nest for good, and a mother's son takes on the responsibility of matrimony and, ostensibly, lifelong commitment to another. If the long, steady road to adulthood is characterized by conscious acts that limit choice and increase responsibility (such as monogamy and mortgages), the selection of a life partner is certainly the most ominous instance when we are faced with the proposition: "choose one item from this list, and one item only, forever".
One's selection of husband or wife is the single biggest decision one ever gets to make. Other determinations in life - such as choosing a certain college, or accepting a particular job - may in fact turn out to be the more influential inflection point in retrospect, after all is said and done. Our trajectories may be forever altered by a fateful decision to move to London on a whim, for example, as that choice may have the knock-on effect of placing you there when you meet your future wife, settle in that city for 30 years and raise your kids as Chelsea football fans. All of us can point to moments of extreme influence to our life's course that we didn't know at the time would be so dispositive; marriage, however, is not one of them. We know - or presume, at least - at the very outset that this will likely turn out to be the most critical choice we ever make. Marriage is pregnant with possibility and portent, yet paradoxically is the ultimate point of no return as well.
For that very reason marriage is a momentous milestone of maturity. The acts of choosing one person for life, consecrating that selection in ceremony in front of families and friends, and symbolically shedding the individualism inherent in singledom, all contribute to mark, in some senses, the end of the beginning. Marriage accelerates the onset of adulthood like no other event, and it should. This is not to suggest that one cannot be an adult without getting married, of course. Being a husband or wife to someone is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to adulthood, unfortunately. Moreover, a church or civil ceremony is not needed, either, to confirm a commitment between two people. What remains true, however, is that marriage - in its literal or more allegorical sense - is for many the watershed moment between adolescence and adulthood.
4) Munchkins
I'm never been married, nor do I have any children. But those of my friends who have done one, then the other (the traditional but increasingly less fashionable sequence) describe each stage quite differently. Marriage, they say, is largely an evolution on coupled life. Having kids, in contrast, is a revolution.
It's easy to understand their point of view. Many of us have experienced living with a girlfriend, if not leading what essentially constitutes 'married life' with someone. Setting aside the sacrament of the wedding day, a young married couple's quotidian life is largely the same after the big day as before it. Sure, the stakes are higher and the stationary may have changed, but the fundamental dynamic of interaction has probably not altered one iota from pre to post matrimony. Not so when the munchkin arrives ...
It's a cliche, but children change everything. The entire family unit shifts from being about your own wants and needs to the child's. The two individuals who previously made up the couple now fuse into a 'family', with its seemingly sole and central task to protect, provide for and promote the well-being of their son or daughter. Jon and Jen fade from view, replaced by the more functional titles of Daddy and Mommy; Exit personal time and parties, enter parenthood.
Bringing another life into the world is probably the biggest responsibility one can ever assume. Monogamy was the first step on that road, but it can be undone without much consequence. Mortgages hold repercussions, but they threaten credit ratings, not defenseless kids. Marriage is a major statement of faith made to friends, family and especially the female with whom you're wedding, but alas we all know this doesn't make it impervious to the desire for do-overs. Marriage mulligans happen all the time. Munchkins, on the other hand, offer no such flexibility. Once you have a child, he or she is yours for life. In some ways, it's the ultimate caveat emptor.
It is in that irreversibility that becoming a parent accelerates our inexorable movement to maturity. For the first time in your life, you really can't change your mind. There is no option (pace adoption or abandonment) but to fulfill the implicit promise you've made to your offspring to raise them to the best of your ability. It will mean DVD nights instead of decadent and debaucherous soirees, red eyes instead of rest, sacrifice instead of self-orientation. Doing so will require, as my cousin Marcus once eloquently put it, turning 'me' into 'we'.
5) Monotony
The responsibilities of parenthood are huge, but the rewards seem to be greater still. When one graduates to the rank of parent, we undertake the biggest role of our lifetime - in deeds if not in significance. You can't help but be matured by the experience, but also mellowed by your new lifestyle. Part of the challenge in adapting to parenthood, it seems to me, is accepting, even embracing, the simpler pleasures that parent life brings. My friends now find joy in pushing their daughters on the swing, when they used to thrive on putting the moves on someone else's daughter. Saturday mornings in the park now rightfully take precedence over Saturday nights at the pub.
Moreover, my friends who have made this switch are genuinely happy. Sure, some grumble from time to time about missing some aspect of their formerly childless life, but all of them speak glowingly, evocatively and poignantly of the pleasure of coming home to their kids at the end of a long day. Play time to bath time, then bed time, is the new triple crown of contentment, even if these moments are largely routine and repetitive to the outside eye.
Let's be honest: parent life is monotonous. But it's a marvelous monotony. Bringing your kids up is a blur of boring but beautiful moments: reading them stories, putting their snow pants on, carrying them to bed. Those early memories are joined by equally mundane, but no less meaningful, events: their first words, their first day at school, their first date. In the proverbial blink of an eye, twenty years of tiny steps forward - tender and wonderful for you, tedious and without significance for others - have come and gone. In this life-stage, time simultaneously slows down and speeds up. You experience seminal, singular and signature events much less frequently (that crazy weekend in St. Tropez!), and the sheer pace of change of your life comes to a crawl. On the flip side, the regular - and regulated - rhythm of parenthood paradoxically makes the years fly by.
One has to mature before making monotony your friend. Much like quicksand, If you struggle against it you will suffocate; however, if you accept it warmly, you will be enveloped by its embrace. Maturity allows you to make this counter-intuitive leap of faith.
6) Midlife
At a certain point in time, you realize that you have more yesterdays than tomorrows. For some, that epiphany comes crashing through on a significant birthday - say when a man hits the big 4-oh. For others, it occurs at one of life's more natural inflection points, such as when your daughter gets married or your son gives you grandchildren. Whatever the trigger, some form of trauma will follow. Why? Because the idea that one has reached the turn in our life journey is among the most sobering thoughts that can cross the transom of our mind. Accepting that fact forces us to acknowledge that we've begun the home stretch of our existence. It means coming to grips with the concomitant decline in our capacities. It requires us to shelve some of our grander misconceptions about ourselves and what we would accomplish. In essence, midlife confronts us with the chilling calculus that we've reached the beginning of the end.
Of course, one can choose to look at the glass half-full, and regard half-time with hope as much as apprehension. I commend the people who choose the optimist's path, and plan to be among them when I hear that whistle myself. Even if you do manage to summon that measure of sagacity however, the act can't help but age you. Either the thought of fewer tomorrows terrifies you, in which case one frantically fumbles for one last gasp of the future. Alternatively, one can serenely succumb to seniority, and accept that one's time is coming closer to the end. Regardless of the approach, midlife matures you in a subtle but unmistakable manner. It also foreshadows the penultimate phase of our life.
7) Mortality
I believe that we experience two deaths in life. The first comes with the final call on our 'childhood', when our last surviving parent passes. In that moment, we become parentless, and while it's ridiculous to compare the tragedy of a forty year-old orphan to that of a four year-old, the effect is doubtlessly still seismic on the psyche. At our core, we are all still someone's kids - even if we have some of our own. My aunt Rhea, a mother and grandmother, still calls her younger brother - my 65 year old Dad - 'le petit', and frets about how he's not 'used' to drinking wine. My Mom's eyes still well up when she thinks of her father, gone almost two decades now, and will sometimes refer to him in recollected conversations as Daddy. This is normal, and natural. In some important ways, one doesn't stop being a child; the heart is hardwired from birth to harken back to that parental bond with fondness. Losing that connection is like losing a limb: the pain may fade, but one's spirit is forever amputated by the loss.
The death of our parents, taken by itself, would mark anyone's life as a milestone. However, the onset of their mortality also serves to presage our own. The passing of the past generation pushes us to death's front of the line. We suddenly become the elder statesmen of the family, the torch of leadership being thrown to us to hold high. This new role imbues us with responsibility, and forces us to look at life from a different perspective. One can't take health, and life, for granted from that point onwards. The future is irrevocably fraught with preoccupations about our 'second' death, the one that will inevitably come to visit us personally.
Facing our ultimate end must be the most maturing moment of one's life, and it's fitting that the most significant step towards adulthood comes - literally and figuratively - last. But I imagine that for those days, months or years when we are keenly aware of our mortality but not yet upon it, life is sweeter, richer and more rewarding than at another point in time. That lesson - that life is fragile, fleeting and fabulous all at once - is the most important one of all; what a shame that too many of us realize it far too late.
Maturity is an elusive concept. For some it's relative, for others an absolute. For me, it represents the crossing of certain milestones which I've laid out above. Monogamy, Mortgage, Marriage, Munchkins, Monotony, Midlife and Mortality are the 7 gates towards that higher consciousness, the major signposts on our road to adulthood. With the passage of each one, we add a layer of self-awareness, another ring to our personal tree of knowledge.
While I generally regard these events to occur in this chronological order, they need not necessarily. Sadly, all too often marriage precedes monogamy and not vice-versa; munchkins can happily come before matrimony with great benefit to all involved. Others might suggest more appropriate - or indeed more personal - milestones that marked them profoundly. My list is not intended to be either definitive or exhaustive. Rather, it represents my first cut at cracking the code of adulthood, at charting the moments when we stopped being kids and started our path to personal responsibility, parenthood and perishability. In the final analysis, we're all entitled to our own view of what shapes or shaped our development from adolescence to adulthood. The actual stages matter less than the lessons learned, and the wisdom, perspective and self-knowledge gained from those experiences.
When did my friends all become adults? I'm not certain that they have, but I'm sure they're on their way.
You a brave man Ion, thank you for sharing these insights. I am the proud father of an almost 6 year old daughter and I'm not exactly sure why but each day brings new delights. Becoming a father relatively late (42) might have had something to do with it but its is more the paradigm shift as you observe above.
Also impressed by the book marinade and the fact that your blogs are more signal than noise when you have something to say. Bravo for you.
BTW - have you read any John Ralston Saul? I would love to know what others think of his writing.
Posted by: Jason | Friday, June 22, 2007 at 08:41 PM