I’ve had an unsettling feeling for some time, I wasn’t quite sure what it was until recently.
I was best man at my cousins wedding and after I had done revealing the gory details of our childhood, my uncle put his arm around me and said “I just realised that you two are no longer the young boys playing football in the garden anymore”. And then it hit me – I was old! well at least I was an adult (which when you’re ten years old, anything over twenty one is classed as old!).
For years we are part of a family unit – our mums, our dads, are our guides, our conscience. We did what we were told; we went where our parents went. We knew our boundaries and we grew as individuals based around those boundaries, combining this with our own life experience and the lessons life has taught us in our short existence on earth.
But there comes a point in life when we must step out from being the junior officer in the family unit and stand out on our own two feet as the general… an adult! It’s a scary feeling, knowing we don’t have our parents to fall back on. Knowing that with every decision we take and with every mistake made, our parents won’t be bailing us out. We have to find our own way in the world and eventually begin our very own family unit (then again you could live the life of a bachelor for the rest of your days!).
As I find myself saying things like “I remember when a snickers used to be called a marathon” and “we never used to have the Disney channel when I was a kid”, I can’t help but remember that as a child we couldn’t wait to be grown up and do exactly what we want and yet now I wonder, was it better when we were reliant on our parents and didn’t have a care in the world?
