joey-hazell:

inkskinned:

there will be a moment when you realize you are more grown up than your parents are. this is the loss of childhood, my love. it is when you’re standing in the kitchen and one of your parents is screaming about something and you recognize: you will let them win the fight not because you are wrong, but simply because you know that they will keep shouting unless you drop the subject. you expect them to have childish understandings of things. they will hold onto their concept of the world as if it was not a changing thing. they must be right, and they must be somehow more right than you, always, in everything. their idea of control is so necessary to who they are that you just let it go.

this is the moment. you are 11 or 17 or 21. and you realize that you’re more mature than they ever were. 

and in some odd, sad way, this frees you. where they have stagnated, you continue.

For those saying in the notes “wow teens really think they’re more mature than their parents just because they disagree lol?” No, it’s not about that.

It’s about seeing my mom use childish tactics of name calling, and changing the topic to another issue when my sisters call her out on something. When my sister asked her what was so wrong about homosexuality and my mom only had one response, “It’s not normal,” to every follow up question my sister had. It’s when my dad decides to make a joke, and getting unreasonably angry when it’s not recieved well, deciding that we just can’t take a joke and not that he didn’t read the room right. It’s when my aunt is proud of herself for being close minded and laughs at my sisters and I for trying to say that maybe she shouldn’t be. 

As a younger teen I had a theory that because my mom ran a daycare out of our home for so many years that she now only knew how to argue like a child. It’s been years since the daycare and she still resorts to childish tactics. And as I got older I saw it more in the other adults in my life. My sisters see it too, and we’re becoming experts in how to navigate our them as if we were the parents learning how to control our children. 

I love my parents I really do. But at 23 years old it is indeed a bit sad and frightening to realise that these figures of authority really dont hold that much more over me in terms of maturity anymore. And that yeah, there are many scenarios I have to navigate as the adult in the situation, and be

the one willing to let things go. 

Basically, it’s the realisation that respect is earned, not demanded simply because someone is older.