Acting My Age
With art by Jason Ericksen
 
As I write this, I’m twenty-six-years-old.
 
My dad was twenty-six when I was born. While the same age as me in years, I’m guessing he had to be a little older than me as far as maturity goes. Hell, my mom was twenty-three when I popped out of her! Holy crap, man! When I was twenty-three I was living with a college buddy in Columbus, OH. My first time on my own in my own apartment. Going out to bars every weekend, seeing movies with reckless abandon, reading comic books—basically being a barely-mature kid. A child/man/person. My mom had just had her first kid. She was definitely an older twenty-three than I was. She had to be.
 
They say that forty is the new thirty. People are living longer and all that. So my twenty-six must be the new sixteen. That’d explain a lot…I should just be getting my damn driver’s license by that rationale. It’d also help me reason why, despite the fact that I’m going to be thirty in just over three years, I still feel pretty much the same way I did when I first got that driver’s license a decade ago. Maybe not quite physically, what with the need for a little more sleep, the extra pounds, gray hairs, and occasionally aching bones, but mentally? So little has changed. It’s kind of shocking when I think about it.
 
Sure, I’ve had some growing experiences, learned a few things here and there, but the way I think… My thought processes… I don’t know if they’re all that much different than when I was a junior in high school with a part-time job bagging groceries, hanging with the same friends I’d had since I was ten, and still living with my momma. I look back now and think, “Not a care in the world!” But it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. Things like homecoming and my grades were important back then. Just as important as moving in with my girlfriend and my “career” are now.

 But when my mom was my age, she had two little boys and a full-time job. She was way different than when she was at sixteen. She was an “adult”. Didn’t have any other choice. While I work eight hours a day, then go home to write or read comics or mess around on the internet, she’d work eight hours, then get her boys from the babysitter, go home, take care of us, make dinner, and then have to keep a close eye on us to make sure we didn’t blow up the house or break our goofy necks jumping off the roof of the garage, towels tied around our necks for capes.
 
So while I bitch and moan about my workday as I relax and play when I get home, my mom basically worked 24/7. In the end, right now, and for the past twenty-six years, I’ve only had one person to truly look out for all day everyday: myself. Sure, I have friends and loved ones who count on me to a certain extent, but they’re all fairly self-sufficient. My mom and dad had little goofy creatures counting on her for their very survival!
 
Why’d this happen? Is it only because my parents had kids when they were my age? Did they actually, deep down, still feel like dumbass, shiftless kids who really wanted to hit the bar or catch a flick? That’s definitely part of it. No doubt. In fact, I have two very dear friends around my age with a couple rugrats much like my parents twenty-six years ago. Do I feel younger than them? To a certain extent, yeah. Sometimes.

So maybe it’s a combo. Maybe there are two main reasons why I still feel closer to my teenage self a decade ago to the burgeoning adult I think I should be. There is the “forty is the new thirty” factor, which–for me at least–maybe leads into the fact that as I inch toward thirty, I still have no one truly dependent on me. I’m not responsible for anyone’s survival but my own in the end. This is a huge part of what apparently allows me to be much more selfish and far less mature than my mom at my age…
 
But that’s not all of it. Kids don’t automatically make someone “grown up” nor are they necessary to make one “grown up”.  Some of it definitely has to do with society. The thirty is the new forty factor plays into it some, but for a while now, each generation’s had it better than the previous one. My grandparents worked hard so my parents would have it “better” (i.e., “easier”) than them. And my parents did the same for me.
 
Does having it easy make one immature? What about my future kids? Will they look back at me the same way I look at my parents? Christ, so… will my kid’s thirty be my twenty?? My mom’s ten??? At this rate, my great-great grandchildren will still be breastfeeding and in diapers at forty…

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D.J. is one of the many swell columnists for the footnote. He is, however, the only one that ever thinks about breastfeeding at the age of forty.