"Methinks I doth protest too much
And no matter what the people say
I'm gonna have to get in touch
With my inner adult someday” – Joe Jackson
I live in Portland, Oregon, where discussions of one’s inner child abound. Portland may be the ultimate ‘do your own thing in a peaceful way’ city in the country, and the Inner Child who wants to skip rope, play Frisbee and on the swings and teeter-totter, and definitely NOT come in for dinner and homework is as iconic an image as any. If anyone decides to name themselves Inner Child and run for office, I would not bet against them winning (I can see the campaign slogan now: Naps for everyone!).
There’s something alluring about the concept, and there may be some substance in it. I’m in the middle of the usual lifespan; my dad recently died at the age of 84, my granddaughter was born ten months before that. I thought that by now I would be closer to ‘dad-like’ than ‘granddaughter-like’ thinking, but then this happened: several months before dad died, he told me, “I just don’t feel old.” Don’t feel old? The man walked with a cane, plotted his course through buildings based on the location of the bathrooms, spent twelve to fourteen hours a day asleep, and considered shopping for groceries and then making dinner a full day. How does he not feel old?
Soon after dad died, my daughter voiced something similar. Mother to a ten-month old, she said she didn’t feel like a mom, or how she thought she’d feel when she became a mom. Maybe she thought she’d receive some special endowment of wisdom and patience. She always thought she’d be a mom, but didn’t think she would be a mom.
Maybe as adults we always think of ourselves as being younger than we really are. I no longer eat myself sick on junk food, and a glass of wine with dinner pretty much does it for me and alcohol these days. Maybe I’m smarter. I would say I’m considered by and large an upstanding member of the community. So yes, there are differences between the current me and the younger me. Yet maturity was never something I made a goal, it was more like something I reconciled myself to, that I talked myself into because it was good for me, like doing homework. Something I’m glad I did once I’ve done it.
But if play and joyful self-expression are aspects of childhood, so are petulance, self-centeredness, even a shocking level of innocent and unintended cruelty. I am thinking here of how my fifteen month-old granddaughter tries to pet the dog: by swinging at it. Something else I see her do: arrange everything just so to her liking. Move one of her dolls and you’ll hear about it, believe me.
Since I was twelve, the bicycle has been a primary means of adventure; it is joyful exuberance to ride. I would ride through neighborhoods I’d discovered and gaze at the houses that looked almost exactly like mine, but it seemed to me that the people who lived in them surely led far more interesting lives than I did. It was a thrilling adventure, and I still feel exactly that way. But back then I also reacted sometimes with impatience, indignation, a sense of hurt. I personalized the objective, had an impulse to hit out. And I liked everything just so: I chafed at having to wait at stop signs, snorted with indignation at various inconveniences in the path of my ride. Thing is, I still feel those same things, and I even feel them in the same way. Like my dad and my daughter, I find myself sometimes feeling about myself like I can always remember feeling.
But I don’t act on those feelings the way I used to, and therein lies the danger of idealizing the Inner Child. Feelings come in packages, in sets; they can’t be distilled and only the good parts purified. A childhood made up solely of dreamy wonder is a work of monumental revisionist thinking; a similar adulthood can only be unworkably wishful. On the bike I hope that some part of me will always feel like a twelve-year old on an adventure, but to enjoy it I have keep a handle on childish responses of anger and resentment. For that, I’ll need my Inner Adult.
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