The title of my blog, Pretending to Be Grown Up

Why am I calling my blog Pretending to be Grown Up?  Well, actually that's also the working name of my memoir, which I began to write last autumn, 2012, and which I am planning to share with you on this blog.

And here's the reason I'm thinking about calling my memoir by that title:  that little girl that you see on the header of my blog, of course, is me, around age 3 or 4, and always I feel her (young Laura) inside of me.  At some significant points in her young life, she felt betrayed by some important people.

So I feel that she (I) never really grew up--but sort of froze in time--waiting for someone whom she could love and trust..  Naturally, I looked for that love and trust in a lot of wrong places and in some of the right places.

(When I was a child, the game that I played most often was "teacher."  I was the teacher and my dolls and stuffed animals were the students.  I played this game for hours on end.  So naturally, I followed my dream and became a teacher.  By the way, because of my family's moving around with my Dad's job, I went to a dozen different schools as I was growing up, so I got to experience a lot of teachers!)

One of the right places where I did find love was in my classroom with my students.  I was a high school English teacher for nearly 40 years.  It was there that I could be myself, my "adult" self, and feel pretty good about myself.  It was there that I got to trade in the dolls and stuffed animals for real live students! Even though at times I was "pretending to be grown up,"  I played that adult game rather well.

But sometimes at school, the child Laura would emerge.  For some reason, she was particularly vulnerable around the other teachers and around parents--around other adults!  That's where she got hurt the most.  Interesting.

The Second Half of Life by Angeles Arrien is an amazing book that I am reading now.  Arrien talks about how African folklore tells us that we have five faces: child, youth, adult, elder, and essence.  These faces (or masks or roles) are created by family conditioning and by cultural imprinting, among other things.

The book points out that we may have over-identified with some of these roles and may even confuse a certain role with who we actually are.  For me, as an adult, I had over-identified with being a high school English teacher.  All too quickly in my early 20s, I became experienced, trustworthy, and responsible.  And at times, I think that for good or bad, the community in which I lived also over-identified me with that role.

But I am so much more, as are we all, than just that one face or role.  I am more than just a teacher.  And now in my elder stage of life, I have been given the opportunity (the time and health and where-with-all) to discover who else I am or who I really am.

Time to go back to make amends to the child and to the youth that I once was and that I, too, may have neglected, criticized, or betrayed.  Then I can stop pretending to be grown up, stop being my false self, and grow up fully, at last.  As the book suggests, I can blend together my five faces and know the radiance of my true self.  If we are willing to do the soul work, we all can come to know the face that we had before we were born.  For that is who we truly are!