Photo by Collyn Ware
She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child’s perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here–the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Oh, the extortionary rent you have to pay to live in the twixt time, the nether world of adolescence! As one who has already passed through and emerged on the other side, Dillard is painfully aware of the dues you must pay to live in a world that appears first as a glorious beacon on the horizon of adulthood but then inevitably loses some–if not much–of its luster. The smiles tinged with fear, the furtive glances at others who seem so perfectly made, the nail-bitten obsession to fit in. To survive, you must pay rent to the world’s landlord for whom you are just another boy or girl mucking a way through adolescence.
Poet Sylvia Plath describes this coming-of-age process as doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world. Isn’t it enough that adolescents must pay extortionary rent? How doubly brutal, then, that these dues “entitle” them to leave the land of childhood for an anxious and unsettling world.
My granddaughter, Gracyn, will turn eleven soon. This summer, I witnessed the fragile walls of childhood’s cocoon begin to crack. As the cracks began to widen exposing a new and different creature, it was almost more than I could bear. There were so many moments during which I wanted to tell her to burrow in, to just wait for another month (or year) before taking flight. I found myself desperate to sell the attributes of cocoon-life. I lay awake at night and imagined the anxious and unsettling world into which she would soon emerge. And too many times, I realized that I was crying.
In her photo, she is backlit by a soft ochre sun and framed by the foilage and berries of summer. Her face is guileless, the face of a child. Her eyes– fixed on her mother behind the camera–sing from a light source within. Here is the garden before the fall, the female unblemished and open.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes:
Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of “coming of age”—to learn how to stand alone. She must learn not to depend on another, nor to feel she must prove her strength by competing with another. In the past, she has swung between these two opposite poles of dependence and competition, of Victorianism and Feminism. Both extremes throw her off balance; neither is the center, the true center of being a whole woman. She must find her true center alone. She must become whole.
To stand alone, to achieve balance and find one’s true center, to become whole–these are serious dues, indeed. As much as I yearn to keep Gracyn in childhood’s cocoon or an Edenic garden, I, too, know that she must pay these dues in her own way and in her own time. She will suffer through periods of imbalance and dependence. She will compare herself to others and find herself lacking. She will wake to find that her world is not fair and that the happiness that came so easily in childhood eludes her. She will love and lose. And she will be reminded that there is always, always more rent to pay.
Bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on a character’s psychological and moral growth from childhood to adulthood. How we love a good coming-of-age story or film. We laugh and cry with Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, and Scout Finch. We settle in with a bucket of theater popcorn and spend a couple hours living vicariously through the characters in Dead Poet’s Society, The Breakfast Club, and The Outsiders.
For adults, this is familiar–albeit frequently painful–territory. We paid our dues and pioneered through adolescence’s seemingly endless frontier. Having reached the promised land of maturity, we are often too quick to dole out smug advice and platitudes, guaranteeing teens that they, too, will survive heartbreak and acne and the worst that social media can dish out. Perhaps we do this because we really don’t know what else to say or do, for if we were being honest, we would simply sit and suffer with them. Coming-of-age themes may make such great movies and books because generally speaking, we are confident that their protagonists’ struggles will end and that we will leave the theater or close the book with some genuine sense of catharsis. But as many of us know too well, real life may not be as generous. The cathartic release we long for may be tortuous months–or years–away.
I’m certain that every generation has claimed an even darker, more challenging world than the generation before them. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the world into which my granddaughter will step is genuinely darker and more challenging than many earlier ones. There is much more shouting over people and drawing lines in the sand. The images of males and females that many youth regard as ideal–and therefore to be painstakingly emulated–are photo-brushed, digitally-edited gods and goddesses. The old adage that you can be who you want to be if you work hard and keep your nose clean persists, even though it sounds sadly more like fiction now than ever. And the talk of climate change, extinction, and environmental disaster confidently heralds the end-of-times.
I’m certain that Gracyn will pay her dues and dish out her allotted rent as she moves from childhood into adolescence and beyond. As her grandmother, though, I’m respectfully asking the Grand Landlord of the Universe for a much, much reduced rate.
