A Child's Confession
about acting like an adult
Do you ever fear that someone might discover that you aren't really grown-up inside? You're actually just faking it. Sure, you have a checking account. Sure, your name is on your car's title. You get a W-2 and 1099 at the end of the year. They say you work a grown-up job. They say you paid quite a lot of interest on that house. But you know the truth. You're actually just a child who inexplicably found himself in this grown-up body that, according to the mirror, is looking less and less child-like and more and more like an old fogie. How did this come to be and what will happen if the general public or your kids discover that you're just pretending to be grown-up? The urge to play still comes calling now and then. And if there are no dishes to wash or things to fix, perhaps there will be time to pretend...imagine...invent, but in secret, for adults don't do that sort of thing. Do they? Adults are businesslike, sagacious, stoic, and precautious. Rather, boring too. You can't honestly say you ever wanted to be like them. Oh, to do adult things, yes, but not act like them, at least, not in the dull boring sense. I suppose acting grown-up wouldn't be half bad if you didn't fear blowing your cover at every turn. But you get the uncanny feeling that the director of this play doesn't care so much for your choice of costume and is planning on blowing your cover sometime soon. It's not just him that seems against you, but the other actors and actresses too. What if, while traipsing across the stage, they purposefully step on your oversized costume, thus revealing that you're only pint-sized and using stilts to look tall? The fear is real. Continued existence in this state seems worse than if the disguise fell off, the audience had a good laugh, and the play went on without the costume. Yes, that would relieve the pressure of all this posing and posturing and pretending like you know what you're doing. And if that is the case, why not say to hell with the whole charade? Why not post notices and make an announcement? "Ahem... I am not grown up. What you see before you is a child, yes, a child born anew of God just the other day. And I'm learning how to do things as if for the first time now—learning how to be your friend and raise these kids, learning how to take care of my things, and stand in front of an audience and say stuff, maybe even stuff others are thinking but don't know how to say. This is my confession. And if you are a child too, who wants to quit pretending you know everything, let's be friends and play together. We can pretend in the old childish ways, not that we’ve arrived at maturity, but that we’re strategic army commanders or daring explorers or creative inventors or bedecked royalty or industrious managers. Let us pretend that we are busy being what we dream of being and then let’s have lunch.”