I’m starting to wonder if I’ve grown up yet. No, it’s not because I still like pop music or that I enjoy playing on the playground with my kids…I’m actually pretty bad at that, and have no clue what music is popular nowadays. It’s more this sense I get when I’m with other adults. I hear myself talk, and I suddenly just think….”I really don’t have a flipping clue what I’m talking about” I fear I am sounding like that university student home for the holidays talking with premature authority on a number of issues with which they have a newly acquired base level of understanding of, but no real grasp of yet. It’s like I’m trying to sound intelligent and people are sort of patronizing me by nodding and smiling. and I just want to shriek at myself to,  “SHUT UP!!!”

I have this overwhelming desire to simply stop talking..and listen…except my mouth keeps going, and I dread to think the rubbish that is pouring out for the umpteenth time. I guess maybe the thing is, I don’t have anything new to say…and I’m repeating myself, and It’s starting to get on my nerves. I’m also finding small talk is much more of a drudge than it used to be. If I can’t think of something to say, instead of smiling gamely and flowing with things, I am retreating, feeling like…actually, if I don’t have anything to say, then I’m out of year…see you later.

I look at my life and I look at this real live house I’m living in, and my two real live children I’ve had, driving one of them to a real live school, it’s like I’ve crossed this threshold and I am well and truly a real live parent. I have to cook real live diners and help with real live homework. Perhaps the pre school years are like the childhood of parents….we sort of play at having babies and looking after them, but now that they enter school it’s like the point of no return…and it really all has happened now.

I just don’t feel old enough… I just feel….strangely immature. I feel like a kid playing house with little dolls some days. It just doesn’t feel real. Until I’m sitting and chatting to people and I realize they all seem so much more grown up than me, and I feel like the token teenager in a crowd of adults. You know, the teenager who is mature enough to enter into adult conversation, but is still at the heart of it…a kid with not a whole lot of experience of life and terribly naïve.

I am doing adult things. Least of all things like…parenting. But goodness knows I’ve taken the lazy road more than once in that department. Gosh am I really ready to raise human beings??? I have certain responsibilities at church in various groups etc. but again, I feel like.I’m filling a role, but it feels hollow…like…I’m filling in until a the grown up can come along and take over.

All these last 10 years of living overseas….life has sort of happened around me. Time has marched through and I did indeed  cross the sea as a very naïve and young 22 year old. Plenty of grown up things have happened to me in the last ten years…but have I actually grown up?? People often talk about “being forced to grow up” and “that experience will make someone grow up” and I sometimes wonder if that’s happened to me yet. I seem to have had so many experiences…..but why do I still feel like I did when I was 17?

Have I not suffered enough? Have I not worked hard enough? Have I not really been educated enough? What makes someone grown up? I sort of feel forever locked in to where I am. Whenever people have me over to their house I’m like “wow, I’m in a nice place” and when I have people over I feel like they are sitting in my dorm room at college. I can’t explain it…..like I do a Sunday Roast and I think “did people really just eat that??? What in the world must they think of me?? Why am I even trying???”  I just feel like this teenager that is overstretching and trying to be grown up but in the end….still just coming across as the kid that I am, as though I’ve just tried making my parents breakfast in bed for the first time. Keen as anything…but totally, almost touchingly, clueless.

Maybe it’s that I’ve never really had a proper job and supported myself independent of anyone else. I mean..I sort of did when I first worked for New Life, but really..I was hugely dependent on Jason and Beth letting me live with them. Is it that I’m not earning a wage and feel entirely dependent on my husband and know my name would be no where near a mortgage if it was not for him? Is it that I hardly ever buy clothes for myself because I have no idea what to wear and that I subsist on favourite pairs of  jeans and clothes given to me by friends or sent to me by my mother?  Or is it that I just feel really out of step with everyone around me. The things that worry me don’t worry them, but at the same time, the things that they worry about, I don’t give a second though to. I feel like I’m just on an entirely different planet to everyone else sometimes.

Sure it can all be great and “what makes me me” and all that…but it can be unsettling at times too.

This isn’t said so much because I am overly worked up about what people think..it’s more to do with asking myself…where am I in life?? Am I were I need to be?? How can I grow up?? What is real maturity? Is it the kind of house you have? How much money is in the bank? How many years you’ve had a mortgage? what sort of job you’re working at?  Is it the quality of clothes on your back? The sort of meals you cook? The kinds of conversations you have? The books you read?

Or is it just that  I’ve become self obsessed recently..(like a teenager) and I need to start reaching out??

I’m not sure. But I’m asking the questions.

This morning, I typed this into my facebook status:

Today Jon and I have shared 6 years of marriage, where we have lived in 5 homes, visited 6 countries, had two 2 children, lived in 2 hemispheres, experienced a home birth, getting shot at, buying a house, (which was more stressful), Several Chai Tea Lattes, Four trips to London ALL involving obtaining Visas or Passports, a few trips through the refiners fire, and lots of strawberry pancakes on a Saturday morning.

I wanted to say more but it wouldn’t let me!!  it’s not all about the drama and how much we love starbucks…

I wanted to add that I am so thankful for friends. All the friends who have been so good to us as a couple. Those who have invited us around for dinners and Sunday Lunches. Friends who have let us live with them when we had no where else to go. Friends who have supported us financially when we were missionaries in South Africa, and believed in us. Friends who we have been able to be ourselves around and honest with and who still want to be our friends! Friends who we don’t get to see, but who have prayed for us and loved us from a distance. Thank you!

And thank you to God..without you, without your unconditional Love, without the new Hope you give every day, and without you in our lives, we would not be where we are today. You have provided the lovely amazing people who have befriended us, and helped us through the last six years and to you all the glory goes….