I am as old as my mother

When I was a young child, I once asked my mother her age. She told me that she was twenty-seven years old. As I was a young child, I accepted as simple fact any information provided me by my parents, and so my mom was twenty-seven years old. And she stayed that way for a good five years before it occured to me to ask again.

A child's image of a parent is a thing of permanence that does not fade or erode with time, and so the human beings that are my mother and father today live alongside their infinitely wealthy, omniscient and inconceivably tall past selves. It's always a bit of a shock to return home and look down into my mother's eyes, to know a thing that she doesn't know, to realize that she's continued to age. How can that be? In my mind, she is and shall always remain precisely twenty-seven years old.

As of Monday, I, too, am twenty-seven. A surreal experience; I'm the first age I ever knew a grownup to be. Doesn't that mean I must be a grownup now? I certainly don't feel it. Where are my grownup superpowers? I remember Great Grandma knew a trick where she could take her teeth all the way out of her mouth, and someone told me that was something only grownups could do. Well, I'm twenty-seven years old now, and the damned things still don't budge a bit. I'm much less wealthy than an adult is supposed to be, too; when she was twenty-seven my mom could afford anything I wanted, if I could just convince her that I needed it desperately enough. And now I'm the same age and I have to worry every month about where the money goes. And what happened to the well of infinite knowledge that my parents posessed at this age? About ten years ago I went through a period where I knew everything, but I seem to have forgotten most of it again.

So I seem to be a bit of a late bloomer. One of these days I want to be a father myself, so I'm going to have to do some heavy-duty catching up. Develop a superpower, get rich, learn everything there is to know. I'll be terribly disappointed in myself if I haven't managed all that by next August. By the time a boy is a whole year older than his own mom, he should have figured out how to be a grownup.