Is this just something you naturally start thinking and it's just your imagination? ("And another thing, back when I was your age, I was OLDER!") I don't think it can be entirely imaginary, though.

Well . . . in my case I left home when I was seventeen, and had a miserably failing year. It was my last year of high school, and my secret past includes the fact that I never really ever graduated (a long boring story), which is ironic, considering my current profession. It did me a lot of good, though, and the next year, when I snuck into university, I was better prepared.

My theory is that everyone has to screw up in some major way before they are fully realized adults. That can happen when you're seventeen, or it may happen when you're thirty. Either way, it's a process that tempers whatever steel you've got, and makes you a "grown-up." I think that's why some students I teach are so amazingly mature: almost inevitably there's been a crisis of some sort in their young lives, and they've learned how to cope. If you don't have real crises, you invent small ones, and they suck you into a morass of woe-is-me silliness that annoys people, and definitely makes you still a kid.

I'm still grateful to my parents for letting me fail, and take the consequences. I had support, but I also had to pay for my failure, both in owning up emotionally, and earning real dollars to help pay financially.

Mothering vs. smothering is a fine line to walk. I hope I do as well with my children. It's hard to boot someone out of the nest, with a "Time to fly, kiddo!", but sometimes it's absolutely essential.

te "still coughing up crow feathers, twenty years later!" ach