I am NOT mature for my age!

I am sure many of you remember a time where you were told “you’re so mature for your age”.

As a teenager I am sure you loved hearing that, because all we wanted as children was to grow up right?

Do what we wanted, when we wanted, and have no one to tell us we couldn’t. No curfew, no repercussions for our actions (being grounded, losing our privileges) and the ability to get out license and leave whenever we wanted.

The world we thought we were ready for at the age of fifteen/ sixteen years old was a world we created based on the lives we seen the adults around us living, however, now as adults, we have quickly realized that’s not what life is like at all. We have come to a time in society where trauma is a word tossed around in many people’s vocabularies, and it can mean so many different things. I don’t think as children we thought “you're so mature for your age” directly related to the trauma we were experiencing as children, but 9 times out of 10 it did.

So, Let's talk about it!

As a child, I was told often how mature I was for my age. It was exciting to hear older people acknowledge that you didn’t act like a child. There was so much more going on under the surface of that
though and most of it, I didn’t realize, or accept until I was an adult. A lot of it I knew was happening but didn’t see the changes it was making in me. And some of it, I honestly just wanted to block out of my mind forever.

I am a child of a separated household; my parents were divorced before I could even remember them being married. My little brother and I spent weekdays with our mom and weekends with our dad. “The weekend warrior” he was so often referred to by our mother. When we were young, I recall talking to my dad on the phone every single night before bed “How’s daddy’s goose” every time I answered the phone. It wasn’t until I started seeing my friends with their parents that I even noticed that my family wasn’t like other people’s families. My mother had a different man living in our house at least once a year, typically more. Men that would overtake the “dad” role in our home just long enough to fuck with my head enough to cause dependency issues and then they’d be out, and she’d be on to the next one.

With my younger brother being mentally challenged I tried my hardest to protect him from the lack of stabilization we had in our home. Constantly being sent to my grandmother’s house, or my aunts so my mom could party. Typically having ragers thrown in our house on school nights and waking up to random strangers passed out drunk throughout the common rooms. Numerous times when drunk men would sleep in my childhood bed and piss themselves because they were so intoxicated. This was my "normal”.

Assuming the role of mothering my younger brother was just the job I was given. The job I assumed because someone had to and clearly it wasn’t going to be our mother. Watching my mom depend so heavily on a man’s presence, never getting any emotional, mental, or financial support from them but rather allowing them to attach to our family like a drunk leach, manipulating my mom's fear or being alone for their own personal gain was something that was burned into my brain. This was how love was, this is how a relationship should be, my job is finding broken people and to pretend to fix them for my own comfort of not being alone.

Thinking back now, it’s an incredible realization that the things I was experiencing then would alter the way I lived my life forever.

I wasn’t mature for my age, I was surviving in the best way I knew how, I was coping with the toxic environment my mother was providing for us. I was learning to live in flight or fight for the remainder of my life, and worse than all of that, I was learning that emotions could be handled with substances that masks them.

I know we all loved hearing how mature we were for our age, but I urge you to think about the situations that made us grow up far before we were ready to and address them