When are you Grown up?

What is an Adult?

I want to use my own life as an example of what I'm trying to say. Culture didn't get to where it now is in a vaccuum. For example, my 37 year old son I helped get his BSN last December. When I was growing up we would have called someone getting a Bachelor of Science at age 37 during the early 1960s or late 1950s a "Professional Student". However, my son was dyslexic and a late bloomer but also a genius (even though he didn't believe this until he took an IQ test in college when he was 29). His first wife who was from Brazil insisted he be tested because she was brilliant too. Now his second wife got her Bachelor of Science in Nursing one month ago now. Besides, people who continue their education at any age are respected now by society in the U.S. But this wasn't always the case. This didn't start to be this way until the 1950s and 1960s during the Viet Nam War.

In my own life I gave up my goal of becoming a psychologist when my live in girlfriend got pregnant. I was in my junior year in college at the time. But even then I knew that I couldn't support my wife and child and finish college then. So, since I WAS an adult I gave up my future for my son and for my 1st wife. This is what an real adult does. I have never regretted this because my son gave me something that I never had before- self respect. 

My parents had always told me, "You can be anything you want to be. You could even grow up to be President of the United States if you wish." However, I found this sort of confusing along the way. My father's father had forced my father to be an electrician working for my Grandfather during the great depression and my father had been permanently angry about this and had never really forgiven his father for this. So I had to listen to my father be angry the rest of his life at his father for preventing my father from becoming an Electrical Engineer. However, as I grew up I realized that my father never would have been happy working in an office because he was a total out of doors kind of guy. And only doing something like being an electrician or other construction or being a lineman would have actually made him happy as his work anyhow. So, I envied my father's pride and felt confused by my father's anger at his father about all this. Later I realized that my grandfather had been very wise to send his two daughters to college to meet their husbands but force his 3 sons to be electricians because of the great depression. His sons were never out of work and always had cars and money and the two oldest could afford to even get married during the last part of the great depression just before world war II.

So, when are you grown up? I don't think I ever was as grown up as my Dad. I always feel sort of like a child in comparison to him. But I would say I have always been more "emotionally" a whole person and much more holistic and integrated in all my thoughts and being. He had been abused in many ways by society, by family, by the world, by the great depression and World War II. In fact I never met anyone who had been a soldier in World War II that didn't have ptsd (post traumatic stress disorder). In fact, the same is true for all those who were in the Viet Nam War or Iraq or Afghanistan. PTSD hits everyone that has to kill someone or see someone die by a bullet or bomb or knife. 

So, what does it mean to be grown up? I think it means that you are able to care for others and self and to not harm or kill anyone unless they are trying to harm or kill you.

That's what I think being grown up really means in the end.