caricature girl

By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd be grown up.
~Eve Babitz

This cartoon was hanging on Mark's fridge when I met him and then it hung on our fridge for years. It made us laugh all the time.

I found it the other day while searching through an old photo album and it still makes us laugh. I remember having it on our fridge about 7 years ago and some "grown up" friends were over and saw it there. They didn't find it funny at all. They actually didn't get it. I remember the difficulty in trying to explain it to them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all an advocate for immaturity. In fact I really do have issues with some of that kind of behaviour. I guess it has more to do with the assumption that some people act or just seem more grown up than we do.

I do think that some people feel grown up eventually. I also think some people are just born that way. My son Ry was born more grown up than both Mark and I, and that is what has caused all the difficulty. He's always been "older" than us. At 3 —he was lecturing us on driving too fast, at 7—he was lecturing us on ancient Rome and Greece, at now at 11—he reads the paper in the morning, checks the stock market, and lectures me about the news and the government... oh and refers to his younger brother and sister as "the kids". Parenting him has never been easy.

However, he is still a child and is actually very naive in many non-intellectual ways. I have learned to understand his unique perspective a little more in the last few years. This happened the day I realized that he is almost as uncomfortable being a child as often as we are parenting him as one.

Perhaps some other people just know how to do the things that "grownups" do when they are "supposed" to do them (whether they feel like it or not), like register kids for swim lessons or make sure that there are groceries in the house.
..maybe I could take a class on that...

Oh and here are some things I've been working on (in between thoughts)...









...and of course always listening to music...