Adulted Too Young
Virginia Carraway Stark

It didn’t take long
As a little child
To see that adults
Needed lots of help

When I was small
My mom crawled into my bed
She said, “now you have to take
care of me, daddy left.”

I held my mother while she cried,
Knowing I wasn’t allowed to cry myself.
My heart was skimmed over with cold
Abandoned and alone,
She stole my comfort for herself

Years later:
My mother died while I was gone
I hadn’t spoken to her in years
She couldn’t take care of herself
She couldn’t take care of me
And my little brother called me,’mommy’
He cried in my bed,

I taught him to swim
How to read and do math
I read to him bedtime stories
Shakespeare, Plato and other classics
The other boys didn’t get

It took me years to learn how to cry
My own tears for myself.

But I wasn’t there when she died
Somehow I should have known- they said
She drank too much water- and died
How could a daughter have known?
Why was I the one to blame?

all those years long ago
She crawled up my leg
a monster in the dark
she put the adult curse onto me
an infernal game of tag,
‘you’re the adult now, tag,
no returnsie!’

Adults everywhere with abuse
But no power to help, or no will to help
(the same thing, aren’t they?)
But old people would shelter me,
Feed me, and hide me, teach me…
There was something to look forward to there?

I thought the old were wise
Until I realized they could be cruel
Perhaps crueler than the young
They can be kind as well, but
Like every human under the sun,
Or over the moon
They must choose love over hate
Not covet the youth of the young.

you live life and learn many things
Ways to make things look better,
Work better, grow stronger, all the things
We strive for in life
Some have a pocketful and some a wheelbarrow
But each lifehack saves the generations a world of growing and pain

Some are generous in their sharing,
Others are stingy and unkind
Cruel that you don’t already know
What took them a lifetime to live

I realized this, when I saw a very young girl
Bring in some art, she didn’t know a few easy tricks
I had only recently learned
I thought, ‘oh, she should have–‘
Then I realized, how could she have known?
If I didn’t tell her(in a kind way)
It could take her a decade to learn what I learned
If I was cruel as people can be, and chase her away
How awful for the arts and what a loss that would be!

I knew then that ‘wisdom’ wasn’t any different than ‘lifehacks’
and the old are only as wise as they learned
There first lessons: to be good sharers in grade K!
With the internet we are all each other’s elders now
We all share our wisdom
We may have lost our families
But we have life hacks
We have supports our parents never dreamt of

We know we don’t like adulting
We don’t make our children adult for us
We own our lack of adulting
We share our lifehacks
WE earn new lifehacks

The selfishness of the elders is on their heads
If they want a captive audience
To turn away
They can keep their pockets full of secrets
We will learn another way

I thought wisdom came with age
That was before I became friends
With the old
I thought adults knew everything
That was before
I adulted too young