Adults as Children

By Sally Franz

I decided to take art lessons recently. Now being a right brained person I have done this throughout my life. The thing that has kept me from doing this in the last five years is that my cell phone has a great camera on it, better than my travel camera. It has been so easy to take photos instead of sketches that I forgot I really love to paint. I also forgot that most people do not buy photography, especially from cell phones.

It was a small class of only seven students. The teacher was accomplished, kind, and very helpful. I immediately found myself retrofitting into a fourth grader who wanted to be the best in the class. Where did that come from? I wanted the teacher to stop by my desk, dropped jaw with praises oozing. She instead did what I paid her to do and pointed out all the areas that still needed work and why. I learned an immense amount of new knowledge on color mixing, detail work, contrast. In fact. I learned so much I wondered how I had gotten as far as I had in art before this.

But I still wanted to be teacher’s pet. Now I have a lovely husband who praises me all the time. I have a wonderful family, children and grandchildren who love my quirky sense of humor. But I wanted to be “noticed”. I started making the coffee for the entire class and setting up the snacks. I volunteered to take photos of the teacher’s work to post on her blog. I kept wondering, was I just being a nice person, or was I kissing up?

I may never know, but the point of this story is we may never know our motives, what baggage, urn, or files we have stored in our brains. But for some reason there are just some scenarios where we revert to our childhoods. I would watch it when I would visit my family, especially when my Mom was still alive. Everyone would adjust to the old pecking order of five kids. It didn’t matter what you had achieved since you left that house 30 years ago. It was your job to fit in and make sure you played your role. The teaser, the scapegoat, the jester, the deflector, and the invisible one.

So now comes the time in life when I am the oldest one in the room. I am the grandmother. How can I help my adult children to not have to play a role? How can I support them to be who they are? How can the entire family celebrate all our accomplishments and still have fun together? If I can help break that cycle of family based expectations, I might just get to meet the fine adults their friends know and love. And that would be amazing. Then I also could stop having to play “head of the family” and go back to art lessons.

Sally Franz and her third husband live on the Olympic Peninsula. She has two daughters, a stepson, and three grandchildren. Sally is the author of several humor books including Scrambled Leggs: A Snarky Tale of Hospital Hooey and The Baby Boomer’s Guide to Menopause. She hosts a local radio humor segment, “Baby Boomer Humor with Sassy Sally”.