What It Means to Be a Grownup—Part 1
The moment I was with younger people and needed to play the adult.
That’s not to say I played an adult that I liked. I yelled a lot, in the beginning.
I was 18 and a sleep-away camp counselor for the first time. I was stoked to be in that position, but I was still sassing out what it meant to be the grownup in this situation. I knew a lot of things I didn’t want to be, but I still needed to learn what I did want to be.
I remember this scene like it was yesterday- It happened in the common area, where we did table top activities and eat meals. The kids were ages 9–12 and these were two boys, an 11 and a 10 year old. One of the boys had been labeled the « problem child » by that point. They were sitting at a table across from each other, their heads together.
They kept giving furtive glances around, keeping an eye on any adult who might come too close and find out what they were up to.
While they were checking their surroundings, I was wandering around the room, watching the kids play in small groups at different tables. I noticed the two boys and meandered toward them. I knew they were thinking up some kind of prank, and quite honestly, I wanted to participate.
In fact, that’s all I wanted to do. But the trainings I’d attended in preparation for my first camp came back to me, with the repeated reminder that “you’re the adult, you’re the authority figure, part of your job is keeping order in the group.” So I took upon myself and my 18-year-old understanding of what it meant to be the adult: I rearranged my facial expression from curiosity to sternness and walked up to them purposefully.
In a big, mean voice—I’d spent a lot of my first camp yelling, either to get the attention of the group of 25 kids, or at them for not “listening properly”—I asked them, “what are you two up to?”
The boys immediately tried fibbing their way out of the prank while inside, I died a little. In that moment, I realized that I hated the projected role of adulthood, and began questioning what it really meant for me to show up authentically as the grownup around kids.
I disciplined the kids, cut the prank short and prevented it from happening. But the whole time, I resented the role I’d been put in.
It was that experience that brought me to begin questioning what it really meant to be the adult when facing people younger than me. I realized then and there that I would need to gain my own experiences and form my own opinion, and most importantly—draw my own boundaries as to the kind of grownup I wanted to be.
Being the authoritative disciplinarian for 10 days taught me that that wasn’t the kind of adult I wanted to be. I didn’t know it at the time, but it set me on the path to becoming the grownup I am today.
