I don’t know when I decided to be an adult. I suppose there must have been a decision that meant I chose to “grow up”, but I cannot remember what that decision was or when it happened. I know that I am an adult, with the responsibilities and demands that such involves, but how much of adulthood is declaring war on our own childhoods? In the latest issue of Segullah, Kylie Nielson Turley’s “A War Poem” has set me to thinking, to considering where my motives come from, and celebrating the freedoms that we often overlook as adults.

In primary school I had to run sprints, from the wattles at one end of the school to some indeterminate spot far off. I hated sprinting. I sprinted like a hanging scarecrow, elbows and knees flying but going nowhere.  I hated sneezing through the pollen clouds, loathed watching everyone’s back get further and further away, stared intently at the gum trees off to the side as my classmates ran back towards me. I never reached the turning point, my teacher would always call me back to follow my classmates.  One of my first declarations of war in adulthood was to not ever sprint again.

But like Kylie in her poem, I didn’t give up the task or end goal. Kylie rebels against hoeing, choosing instead to “nip and tuck weeds between thumb and finger”. I fight sprinting, and instead run at a measured pace over several kilometres, still looking at the gum trees I run past,  enjoying them even more now without the pressure and fear of death by internal explosion.

 I am a woman now.

Tasteless brown slimy vegetables,

I do not have to eat

if I don’t want to.

I do not want to.

The one line heard most often in our kitchen growing up was “No afters if you don’t finish your dinner.” It didn’t matter what was on the plate, or how much, I had to choke it all down if I was going to lay claim to dessert. Qualifying for my afters usually killed my appreciation of it, and I would remind myself that things would be different “when I grew up”.

Now when I’m out for dinner or lunch, I ask to see the dessert menu before I order my meal.  My friends and family are bemused at the shimmy-wiggle I do in my seat when dessert is placed before me. I order my main after I’ve chosen my afters, I won’t eat the entire main if I don’t feel like it, or if room for dessert is threatened. Yet I don’t make a big deal of any of this – as Kylie writes, “Now I sit small” and quietly make my choice of dessert, and continue to enjoy the conversation.

As an adult, I have the freedom and opportunity to wage war on my childhood, my youth, my younger self, to change the way I live to be different to how I grew up. I can choose my battles, run the race, and usually eat the spoils. I am a woman now, and it can be fun.

What have you chosen to rebel against? How does that manifest in your everyday? What is something that you did as a child and now deliberately wage war against? You are a woman now – what is something “you do not want to”, so you don’t?

Related posts:

  1. Relating
  2. Supper of my Discontent
  3. And then the brownies exploded


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