u/Delayedretort

I’m 42 years old. I’ve been reflecting on being a grown-up and what that means.

Don’t get me wrong, I am childish in a lot of ways.

I enjoy animated movies with music aimed at children.

I am not dignified. I constantly drop food on myself when I’m eating. I like to get on the ground with babies or puppies. I’m loud and get over excited and I have no sense of how much space I take up.

I have a doll house that I like to play with, taking out all of the pieces and rearranging the scenes and characters.

I talk to myself constantly in my head, often telling myself stories and making things up. I have sculptures and art in my house that have names and backstories. My pets each have a unique pretend voice that I use for them, speak for them.

On top of that, it’s the millennial cringe joke: #adulting. The attitude of ‘I’m not an adult because because all of those milestones of successful adulthood don’t exist now as I swim in student debt”, amirite.

I’ve worked with kids or in education adjacent fields for all of my career. Usually with middle and high schools students. I currently work with about 80 different high school juniors from a variety of schools around the St. Louis region.

We were at the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, a heavily fortified building with security guards and metal detectors. We were safe. It is impenetrable.

Here is a horrible and true secret: Educators vividly imagine what they would do in case of an active shooter situation.

Consider both scenarios:

if everything goes well: a locked classroom with locked closet filled with crying children holding hands texting their parents how scared are being quiet as a mouse listen for gunfire

if everything does not go well: how big are you how big are they can you take them down could you get between could you prevent it where can you place you body so that it would be first somehow between the entire room full of children how can you spread yourself thinner how can you

And so I was at the Federal Reserve and thinking about keeping kids safe. I looked out on the faces of these children, these teens. I thought about how being in charge in emergencies, of that moral responsibility.

Suddenly I realized: I couldn’t tell how old they are. I knew that they were all juniors, all sixteen or seventeen. Some of them looked as young as thirteen. Some could be in their early twenties.

And here is when it snapped into place: I’m an adult, I’m the grown-up, and I’m perfectly okay with that. I’m the person who would help them in an emergency. I am In Charge.

And that extends to not just these kids, but all kids in general. If I am in public, and there is an emergency, I’ll always stop and help the kids. And the kids are in their teens and twenties.

I am responsible for them. Ergo, I am the adult.

In the midst of this warm and fuzzy glow I had, thinking about my responsibility for protecting not just these babies but all theoretical babies in their teens and early twenties, and I was then struck with this:

I couldn’t tell the teen girls from the women in the early twenties, and that made me the adult in the situation. There are men, many many men, who have that same realization: they cannot tell the difference between teens girls and women in their 20s.

And instead of saying to themselves, I guess that means I’m ethically and morally in charge of people in their 20s, Instead, instead they think: that means I can fuck the teens, too, since I can’t tell the difference.

. . .

I have no moral to this story.