Everyone knows that growing up is difficult.  You are constantly discovering things, having new experiences, meeting people, experiencing joy and sorrow, loss and gain.  This process we call growing up is the most difficult thing human beings undertake.  So difficult in fact, that is ultimately kills us.

As we grow up certain things are harder than others to learn and pick up.  For me it was much easier to run around naked and work on my magnum opus of watercolor painting that was aptly named “Clusterfuck Retard” than it was to, oh I don’t know, wash my bellybutton. 

I’m sure we all had things like this that were easy for us to understand, but there are some truths about the world, about the nature of our existence on the planet, that are so earth shattering that they stood as momentous pillars of individual discovery.  We can call them “game changers”, “paradigm shifts”, or “you’re bullshitting me” moments.  Whatever you choose to call them, we’ve all had to deal with these realities in some way or another.  These are the growing pains that hurt your brain, not your body.

Death – I remember exactly where I was when my mom explained to me, very calmly, that all people, except Keith Richards, die.  I was three years old, sitting in my car seat, and my mom was driving through downtown Portsmouth, NH near what used to be a barber shop.  I believe it went something like this:

Me:  Hey Mom, we all live forever right?  People only die when owls kill them, right?

*Note* I was absolutely terrified of owls growing up.  Don’t ask me why.  Perhaps I was a field mouse in a past life.  In any case I recall my parents spent many a night reassuring me that the owls were kept at bay by not only the vigilance of my parents but our windows.

Mom:  Oh…No, honey.  Everyone has to die some day, but not usually until they’re much older.  You don’t have to worry about anything, sweetheart.

Me:  You’ve got to be fucking shitting me?  People can die?!  Why didn’t you say something? 

Mom:  Pooh bear, you really don’t have to worry about it.

Me:  Worry?!  Lady, I am beyond worried.  You’re going to have to change my diaper again.

Mom:  You’re four.

Me:  This is awkward.

Why my mother wasn’t concerned about my foul language is beyond me, but does everyone remember that moment when you realize things could end at any moment?  That it wasn’t just owls that could get you, but you know…two or even three owls? 

This is not to say I went out and starting seizing the day all over the place at four years old, but it definitely made me appreciate what I had going on.  I of course, not being brutally murdered or dismembered by some ungodly force of destruction and death.

Heaven forbid you read the Bible as a child or were informed of some of God’s actions in the Old Testament.  Every other book it seemed that God’s fist, lined with lava and genital eating piranhas, would descend upon some poor kingdom just for messing up the worship ceremony.

Before learning about death my greatest fear was being left at the grocery store with the scary people at the bakery or biting my tongue because you can best believe I did that at least once a week.  

And once you learn about death you start keeping a mental tally of the things that can kill you.  Owls?  Check. Sharks?  Check.  The monsters under my bed? Check. Closet too?  Absolutely.

Gravity – Until you hear about gravity every kid thinks that if only they jumped high enough they would ultimately take off and be free to steal apple pies off the window sills of mean Old Lady McFargus.  I think that’s the plot to every single episode of Leave It to Beaver. 

Because of you think about it, unless kids actually believed their parents, how would a kid ever conceptualize “I don’t seem to be taking off, I bet there’s a universal law in physics that attracts all objects to each other, especially planets and their inhabitants.” No.  You’re thinking, “If I could only get high enough.”  I spent many of my days jumping off chairs in my kitchen telling my mom I was “really close.”  The closest I ever came to flight was either jumping off a swing or doing that thing where my dad balanced me on his feet with him lying on his back.  Yeah it was a great substitute but every kid was thinking the same thing, “Fuckbeans.” 

There was also a sense of urgency in learning to fly because you would just die if that douchebag Spencer from down the street learned to fly before you did.  He was so full of himself.  Ass.

Your Parents Aren’t Invincible – Some of us unfortunately have to learn this at a very young age if one of our parents becomes incredibly sick or, god forbid, a parent passes away.  For most of us we go through our childhood believing that our dads have superhuman strength or our moms have superhuman comfort skills.  How did she know I wanted a tuna fish sandwich during my lunch break from work?! HOW?!  Why do you think kids say things like, “I bet my dad could beat up your dad.”  Dads are our superheroes, our action figures, able to defeat any and all foes. 

It is often not until we are much older when our parents sit us down and “have a talk” to explain that dad needs heart surgery or mom has breast cancer.  It is an incredibly difficult experience, it truly is.  This is not because we don’t understand the effects of cancer or how serious heart surgery is, but it is difficult to psychologically adjust to it because we often imagine this happening to other people; and certainly not our parents.  Because it did seem like only yesterday that your dad could, with relative ease, pick you up and put you on his shoulders in one fell swoop or your mom could run around with you outside playing hide and go seek.  Unfortunately our parents are no longer physiologically Superman, but unfortunately Batman.  There isn’t just one weakness, there are thousands.  That actually just makes their deeds that much super.

How could this happen?  Unfortunately, we must come to terms with the grim reality that there are a host of health related things that older folks have to worry about.  One of the most trying ordeals children have to go through is scraping their knee because they fell off their bicycle and it is difficult for us to understand not having something scab over and heal within a week’s time.  This is indeed the hardest of pills to swallow.  Many brave kids have to do it at a very young age.

You Can’t Grow Up to Be an Animal – This also includes dinosaurs, but most of you know what I’m talking about.  As we grow up we realize that we, are humans… and we can’t do anything about it.  We’re just humans and we can’t, as we get older, become bears or tyrannosaurus rexes.  No matter how much we stomp around the house with stunted arms we are still not a dinosaur.  Eventually we learn to embrace our humanity mostly because we enjoy using indoor toilets.  This is of course unless you’re this guy.

School Sucks – I’m not entirely sure when it happens, but I’m guessing its somewhere around fourth or fifth grade that the homework starts getting a little more serious and your school days don’t simply consist of finger painting, puzzles and learning about “estimating” by guessing how many M&M’s are in a jar.  I remember sitting in school one day and realizing. “Fuck me.  Where is the candy?”  There comes a point when we’re all trying to take standardized tests to help schools get more funding and learning the history we’re fed, but most of the stuff I learned as a kid turned out to be total bullshit anyways.  Yeah, Christopher Columbus was a real nice guy.  The Civil Rights movement also fixed everything.

We come to realize that much of this stuff we will never actually have to know or that I learn more from an hour conversation with my parents than I do spending six hours in a brick building designed to repress a natural affinity for activity.

Commercials Lie – I may have written about this beforehand, but I had this realization around the age of six.  I was watching television when I saw a commercial for NesQuik chocolate milk mix.  These kids, who apparently live in a universe where cartoons and real humans live harmoniously (not unlike Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) mix up a diesel batch of chocolate milk and they are magically transported to a water park except all of the water has been replaced with chocolate milk.  As a kid, can you honestly imagine anything better than that?  I can only think of one thing better:  if the chocolate milk has actions figures floating in it.

I promptly got up from the television, marched into the kitchen and informed my mother that upon her next visit to the grocery store that I would like some NesQuik.  She informed me that Hershey’s chocolate syrup in the refrigerator would do just fine.  I then calmly, but urgently reminded her that she must be off her fucking rocker because Hershey’s syrup cannot conjure a magical chocolate water slide out of thin air.  I also told her to “get to it, bitch.”

After recovering from my mom throwing me through a wall for mouthing off, I was thoroughly disappointed the following week when, despite vigorous and robust stirring, nothing happened.  No chocolate water slide.  No animated and quirky brown rabbit whose ears twist sparked by the consumption of chocolate powder and milk.  I only drink Hershey now.  I hope that rabbit gets impaled by a rhinoceros.

The Importance of the Opposite Sex – I remember when things were so much easier when I didn’t care about girls.  Or boys… wait.  You know what I mean.  I mean if you were a girl that time when you didn’t care about boys.  I can’t stress enough I was speaking hypothetically.

In any case, once the opposite sex is introduced, everything becomes more complicated.  You care what you look like, how you smell, if you need braces, what kind of “fly gear” you are rocking, and so on and so on.  Imagine getting back all those hours you have spent trying to appeal to the opposite sex or contemplating how to adequately do so.  I think many of us would have four PhD and we would have invented the hyperdrive right now.  And by hyperdrive I mean interstellar space travel, and by interstellar space travel I mean I’m a nerd.

And for anyone who is reading this pretending to be really indy and pretend like they didn’t care what they looked like because you shopped at Hot Topic or wore JNCO jeans or put gel in your hair to make it look messed up you can actually put your head in a microwave.  Everyone cared what they look like.  Don’t pretend that you just were really into surfing and didn’t wash your hair.  You cared.  You were playing an angle.  Don’t lie.

Money Rules the World – This one is fairly self explanatory, but I recall being acquainted with the notion of inflation at around the age of eight or nine.  Most kids loved their toys growing up and whether it was Barbies, action figures, Legos, or an Easy Bake Oven, they all cost money. 

And then the prices magically were hiked up.  What kind of sorcery is this?  “Inflation?”  What in the name of Holy Christmas does that mean?  A simple five spot can no longer buy a toy.  You might as well have spit in my Jell-O pudding while kicking me in the shins.

As children this betrayal does not make us disillusioned with money as a theoretical construct, but because we’re Americans we’re incapable of shrugging off this prod into reckless consumerism, but it actually fuels our fire, our want, and our need to have things.  I’m convinced that inflation is the reason allowance was invented and raised as the child got older.  Oh you used to get two dollars a week when you were seven and now you get twenty dollars a week at eighteen.  That’s actually the same amount of money.  This is why I hate math.

Grownups Make Mistakes – This might be another one of the hardest things to understand.  I was blessed with a “nuclear” family that never had to deal with divorce.  I had a dog that never ate a baby’s face.  My upbringing was ultimately perfect save my mom’s unwillingness to let me watch The Simpsons, buy me a Power Wheel, or wage an all out war on owls.

But there is a moment in our childhood when we realize that Mom and Dad make mistakes, Mr. President makes mistakes, Officer Friendly makes mistakes, and Mr./Mrs. Teacher makes mistakes.  Some extreme examples of this are when Dad leaves Mom’s suitcase in the bedroom when going on vacation, or Mom forgets Dad’s special low sodium salt in the cabinet on the way to Applebee’s and “ruins” dinner, or Officer Friendly forgets to read Mr. Criminal his Miranda rights and Mr. Criminal goes back out on the street because of a procedural technicality.  Or we see Mr. President cheating on his wife and lying about it or Mr. President doesn’t listen to sound intelligence forecasting a potentially devastating attack on a symbol of America’s economic preeminence in the world market and thousands of innocent people die.  This has been known to happen.

Things like this happen all the time, every single day, and we don’t notice them as we’re growing up because we haven’t formed our own opinions or developed our own sense of what is right or wrong yet.  We’re still following and not leading, therefore it is difficult to spot mistakes by people that otherwise might not be noticed by a recently formed juvenile psyche.

The ripples of this realization serve as a catalyst for us to embrace the notion of imperfection as a human condition.  Human existence is full of trial and error, decision and indecision, choice, temptations, and ultimate judgment.  As children, when we see the mistakes grownups make we hope to learn from them and form our own direction, but we also realize it’s ok for us to make mistakes as well.

******************************************************************************

All of things we learn as grow up point to one final truth about life and the world:  it’s pretty messed up.  This is not to say that it is messed up in comparison to some everlasting universal standard of order that normatively explicitly states how the world should be, but rather the world is messed up in the sense that it is challenging, confusing, exciting and knowable. 

Figuring out all of life’s problems and harsh realities is like putting together a puzzle in the dark where when you find more pieces the brighter the light gets.  We use the light to illuminate and understand their purpose in the grander scheme of things.  Let’s hope some of us get all the pieces before the light burns out.