Growing Up
Technically and legally, you are considered an adult at age 18 in the US. But we all know that a button is not pushed on our 18th birthdays to make us instant adults.
I’ve been a legal adult for over 50 years now and I am a different adult today than I was right after I turned 18. I was in college then and spent the next few years indulging my pampered intellect in philosophy and literature – in enjoying the beauty of ideas and words.
I was living in Beirut, Lebanon, and a civil war began about the time that I started graduate school. Though danger and witnessing death are adult contemplations, I don’t really feel that I was a fully formed adult even with those experiences. I remember holding binoculars and crawling out with my cousin on her balcony in the early evening to observe the sniper in the townon the hill facing ours. He was perched on a top floor in a hollowed-out building firing at random passers-by. He could have seen us and fired in our direction- we didn’t think of that. We giggled uncontrollably and instead tried to avoid the danger of my aunt discovering what we were doing – not really adult behavior.
In my 30s I got married and had my first child- a son with cerebral palsy. Those first few years he and his challenges were only ours. Though he was the one with developmental issues, it really was still about me. How can I cope? How can I keep him safe?
Gradually as time passed and he had to exist in his own community it was more about how I can affect that community to be more hospitable. That was my first foray into adulthood. I’d say that I was in my late 30s.
An important first step in being an adult, I believe, is to take responsibility for other people. But adulthood is bigger than that- it is also manifested in taking responsibility for a part of the world around you and around those you care about- trying to affect change for a purpose.
My first attempts at change were still mostly self-centered. I was trying to bring attention to people like my son. The reason for that was that I could not abide the looks, the double takes, the avoidance of eye contact in people who saw me with my wheel-chaired little one. I worked at a community newspaper in Maryland at the time, and I wrote articles about accessibility, empathy, and awareness of others with different abilities. I felt I was influencing the world to some degree but really it was about me and my struggles. There was no sacrifice and not a lot of effort on my part in writing about something I felt passionate about. I was not writing from an adult clear moral compass.
As a child I absorbed morality through osmoses- being around my kind, generous parents and family made it easy to be kind and generous. That’s who they were and consequently that’s who I was. However, I credit my husband with my eventual moral compass.
My husband Nabil always had the courage of his convictions – while I don’t think I had any conscious convictions myself when we first met. I was always a people pleaser, and would avoid confrontation at all costs. He, on the other hand, would literally fight for an underdog, loudly- and self- righteously confronting cruelty and bullying. Even during a civil war, he would stand up to militia members with submachine guns – who would be so taken aback by his verbal attack that they always relented. Luckily!
You cannot be a grown up without a moral compass – something you consciously believe in or borders and limits you would not excuse anyone crossing. In my opinion, once you are conscious of your beliefs and what you would fight for- that is when you are truly an adult.
It behooves us to remember two things: that different people’s moral compasses can be very different-event contradictory; that one person’s moral standard may be another’s moral sin. And also, that people mature at different rates so even if they look like adults, they are not necessarily acting from a clear moral compass.
I think my moral journey is similar to most people’s- we start a bit oblivious then a later may fight for ourselves and our loved ones. Only later do we see our reflection in others.
Real maturity is when the human fight becomes your personal one.