Being Mum

A good number of minutes have past since last I got around to writing, so for starters a quick recap on where things currently stand.

Since last I wrote I have (in no particular order):
- got married
- competed in a 5 km fun run
- spent an entire year (2011) without eating any Twisties
- acquired a spinning wheel and re-learnt how to produce yarn
- bought a house, without a mortgage
- moved across the country
- grown so many tomatoes I didn't know what to do with them
- obtained over 50 Fowlers preserving jars
- designed and helped to build a duck house for Merry and Pippin
- brewed a lot of beer
- Skiied in Japan a week after the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit
- stopped working at the mine and
- had a darling little daughter...:-)

So now, I am someone's mum. And still I don't feel like a grown up most of the time.

This has been one of the big revelations of the whole growing up/aging process. As a child I had always assumed that grown ups were somehow different from children, in some fundamental, switching on the light bulb, kind of way. It my head, it justified the superiority with which older people acted, and the way in which they treated those under 18.  I've worked out now that it's not like that - at least not for me. I'm not the same person I was when I was 10, but I'm not that different either. All of the traditional "adult" milestones have passed behind me - turning 18 and 21, moving out of home, finishing formal education, working away, getting married, buying a house and now, having a child of my own, and yet I don't feel miraculously "grown-up". I acknowledge that I am an adult, in a biological sense, but I don't feel some adult superiority, independent of my experiences and knowledge.

Maybe that's just it. Maybe what matters in defining who is a grown up ARE experiences and knowledge, not some arbitrary point in time, or set of accomplishments.  The extra time available for collecting and gathering wisdom may be the true value of having maturity, not the other way around i.e. Being mature somehow automatically makes you wise.