Growing Young

Despite my occasional flippant comment, I consider myself a mature adult. I'm a wife, a mother, once a university student and now a home-educated one again as I constantly push the reaches of my knowledge and strive for learning. I can “deal” with problems, big or little, that life sends. Heck, I can even get up the nerve to make “paperwork phonecalls” (you know, the ones that used to require hard correspondence before the advent of the newfangled telephone), which was certainly a turning point in my development as an adult. ;)

So...why do I feel so out of place among the majority of people who consider themselves “mature adults”? I don't understand the glum faces and pessimistic view of the world—this, you should know, is “realism.” Apparently life is awful, the world is catapulting towards a messy end, and to think otherwise is either stupidity or naivete. I get strange looks from my “peers” from time to time...perhaps I smile too often. Perhaps it is the middle grade novel I am toting about. Or it could be the pigtails, I suppose—because it has also become a criminal offense for a woman over twenty, at least one who has children, to look under forty. Weird.

Because I am a stay-at-home mother, and spend most of my socializing with extended family, church friends, and artists or writers, I realize I'm missing out on a good deal of the “real world.” Last week I got a professional haircut (for the first time in six years!)...and I remembered why I don't like the real world very much. It...was...depressing. Women complained about their husbands in the confident tones that indicated they were sure they had a right to. When they discovered I had just had my third baby, their responses were not congratulatory, but conciliatory. They laughed uncomfortably, confusedly, as I proclaimed that I liked being a mother. They stared, boggled, as my husband grinned at me from the window as he pushed two little girls in the stroller and carried the other. When at last I found myself in the sanctuary of our little car, I finally felt as though I could breathe again—or smile without being stared at.

I've never had this experience in my writer/artist circles. Creative people expect joy—see it everywhere. They believe in wild, impossible-seeming things as a matter of course. They love children—perhaps because, even though they are mature adults, too, they haven't abandoned the children they used to be.

You can see I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I think the ability to be childlike, even in the midst of maturity, is the most important quality an artist can possess—in fact, I think it is the most important quality a person can possess, period. There's a reason we are told that “Unless you become as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Children trust. They believe. They smile. And all the pessimists, excuse me—realists—in the world would do well to remember that faith and a smile will do far more to fix life's problems than all their intellectual complaining will.

I found a quote from Madeleine L'Engle which explains exactly how I feel:

"I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup."

I have a feeling that most of you probably feel the same way. Thanks for being my refuge from the realists.