ladysprite | Just Curious......

When does life stop feeling like pretending and practice, and start feeling like actually being a grownup?

I'm over 30 years old. Many of my friends have children - by the time my mom was my age she did, too. I'm married,, and I've been self-supporting for many years. My husband and I live together, and while our furniture still doesn't match, it's still a pretty nice place, and we're looking at buying a house really darn soon.

I have a job; I even have letters after my name. I've survived being self-employed, I pay my taxes and balance my budget and plan in advance. And still, deep inside, I feel like a kid playing house. My coworkers laugh at me when I call my lab coat my Doctor Costume, but that's really what it is - dressing up and playing a role. Planning meals and going to the grocery feels like a game, where the grownups let me play along and pretend to be running a family just like them.

Part of me wonders if this is from the delayed adulthood effect of graduate school - I had an extra several years of full-time student status, with classes and textbooks and ramen noodles, which pushed off any thoughts of growing up and settling down until I was in my late 20s. Part of me also wonders whether this has anything to do with deciding to be childfree. There's still a pretty strong bias in the world to think of the Standard Plan as 'grow up, get married, have kids,' and since I'm never planning on finishing that path, is my self-image going to be permanently stuck at not-quite-adult?

I'm not at all upset with this state of affairs - as long as meshing with the adult world feels like a game, life is fun. I just wonder, every once in a while, when the Responsible Adult switch is thrown, and what makes people eventually start self-identifying, both inside and out, as a grownup instead of a poser....

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Have you tried "giving back" in the sense of being the senior person in a mentoring relationship? Regardless of your choices about parenting, passing on your knowledge and encouragement to the next generation can help you realize how far you have come. I've had some unofficial mentoring relationships and I have represented my profession at nursery schools, girl scout troops and high schools. I have found it very rewarding.

It sounds like a wonderful idea, but I don't really think there's anything that I'm quite good enough at to mentor someone else. In order to take on the task of teaching another person, you really need to be an expert, and I'm nowhere near that level in anything I do.... :(

Mentoring does not mean you have to be an expert, just know more than the other person does. No matter how much math I know, I learn something from every class I teach. Sometimes it's just a deeper understanding of the connections and purpose, but it's still something new, sometimes about math I've known since high school.

I'm so not ever growing up, but I'm mostly responsible because it just makes my life run better.

If that's how you feel, then you can work with that belief. I disagree, fairly strongly, and so it's hard for me to work from that premise. 'Expert' does not mean 'incapable of learning.' It just means very, very, very skilled and learned.

I don't think it's appropriate for someone with minimal skill and experience in a field to teach or mentor, because I think that an important part of teaching is the instructor's responsibility to make sure that the student gets the best possible (including most accurate) knowledge. That means that, if there's someone better than you available to teach, you have a responsibility to give the task to them - anything less would be robbing the students of that potential knowledge and experience.

This is part of why I have a hard time teaching in the SCA. I'm not a Laurel, so by definition there are people out there better at what I'm doing than me. And it's *really* hard for me to run a class, given that. I keep waiting for someone to storm into my class, slap me down, and call me out for the poser I am..... I know noone's going to, but it feels like they should.

if there's someone better than you available to teach, you have a responsibility to give the task to them - anything less would be robbing the students of that potential knowledge and experience.

"available to teach" is a somewhat slippery phrase. Does someone count as "available" if they're already over-committed with existing responsibilities and can't really take on anyone new? What if they're a bit burned out on teaching and want to take a break? What if they're busy teaching *other* things?

"better" is also tricky. Not all students are best served by the same sort of teaching. There exist students who get all intimidated and flustered by "experts" (especially older male ones), who might be better able to learn from someone like you.

A teacher can teach more than one student at a time, but not an infinite quantity, nor in an infinite variety of ways. If you refuse to step up, then you are "robbing the students" of *your* considerable knowledge and experience.

Remember also that growing up in Carolingia gives you a skewed view of the world. It is proverbial -- because manifestly true -- that a Dancer in Carolingia is a Dance Master in most of the rest of the Known World. And you're well above average for Carolingia. High standards are good, but don't take them to ridiculous extremes. As Cariadoc often says "Do not let the best be the enemy of the good."

In order to take on the task of teaching another person, you really need to be an expert

Piffle. I've taught other people how to play medieval boardgames, and how to contradance, and how to do basic kumihimo. I'm nowhere near an "expert" in any of those things, but I know how to do them and how to tell someone else what they need to learn. You've had a pamphlet published on Italian Renaissance dance, which makes you at least far more of an expert than most people! If I were looking for someone to teach me about that, and I lived in your area, I'd certainly come to you first.

The pamphlet isn't published yet, I'm still working on it - I've only put the translations up on the web, and wrote a couple of articles.

And.... there's a significant difference between showing a friend how to do something in a casual setting and 'taking on a mentoring relationship.' The latter implies setting yourself up as someone's superior and advisor, which I'm *extremely* leery of doing.

Though, to be honest, I still feel that you really ought to be an expert before taking on the task of teaching. Otherwise, how do you know that what you're teaching them isn't wrong?

You seem to be mistaking the word mentor for master tradesman. A mentor/ mentee relationship is far less formal and far less task oriented. She's not suggesting you go into a local high school and become a history tutor, but rather go into a high school and help provide a more useful role model for some young girl there than the over-sexed vapid Barbie dolls they watch on TV. Just spending time, with an adult like yourself, one that has pushed themselves through undergrad & grad school, made a solid life for herself, found a healthy and supportive relationship, embraces herself and her interests without looking to society for approval, made mistakes through out the process and came out the other side all the better for them, but is still cool and not quite their parents so they feel like they can relate, is HUGE! Trust me you are fully qualified and extremely good at this already, you've just never done it! My mother has worked for the YWCA for years setting up and creating her own mentor relationships like this, and from what I've seen they ALL really get something out of it and your just as qualified as the mentors I've seen, if not more so!!

Just Curious......

Mentoring

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