Adulting

August 23, 2017

In our culture, there is no set time, no formal moment when a child becomes an adult. More traditional cultures have their ceremonies and rituals to mark the passing from childhood to adulthood. We have often labeled as ‘primitive’ some of these societies that send boys on a dangerous quest, or that have ceremonies in which the elders initiate the child through rites of pain. We are more familiar with the Jewish ceremonies of Bar or Bat Mitzvah, or the Hispanic Quinceañera that marks the transition of a girl to womanhood on her fifteenth birthday.

The closest thing most of us have to such marked transitions is perhaps the obtaining of a driver’s learner’s permit when one turns sixteen, but for most of us, the transition is at best nebulous and vague, with an extended adolescence that by our government’s measurement of healthcare, keeps a young person in a state of childish dependence until the age of twenty six, resulting in a generation of middle-aged adolescents. But I digress.

Last week, I commented to our daughter that sometime over the summer, her son stepped out of boyhood into young adulthood. He carries himself differently, exuding a confidence and demeanor that he didn’t possess at the beginning of the summer. 

I would be hard-pressed to pinpoint exactly when our eldest granddaughter became an adult. I suspect she would point to her first day of college, or perhaps more specifically, when her shopping consisted entirely of those mundane necessities such as shampoo, laundry soap, and paper towels. Returning from one such outing, she exclaimed that she wasn’t too excited about “adulting.” My own read on the situation would be last year at college when she handled a very difficult situation without the intervention of any family members. 

This morning, Alex came over for breakfast. We ate, but more importantly, we talked. The conversation ranged from funny and innocuous incidents to life issues of education, career, faith, love and marriage. In our spare bedroom hangs a photo of Alex as a toddler. Childhood melded into adolescence, but somehow, I missed the transition to adulthood. But as we sat this morning, it was not a child or even an adolescent sitting at the table, but a grown woman. 

As she stood to leave, I took her by the waist and suggested that we pray. Somehow, it is easier to send her off into her future with prayers that commit her into the hands of our loving Heavenly Father, before whom we all remain children, no matter how grown up we are.