Dear Phantom 2: I Don't Want to Grow Up!

Dear Temple Cloud,

I’m about to turn thirteen, and I don’t want to.  I heard my dad say, ‘Oh, dear!  My little girl is about to be a teenager!’ and he sounded so sad, because he loves me, and now I’m about to turn into a monster that no-one can love.  My mum has a book called How to Survive Teenagers.  I don’t want to be a disaster that my family has to ‘survive’, like a nuclear war!  There’s a documentary series on television, about teenagers and their parents, called Living with the Enemy.  I don’t want to be my parents’ enemy!

I don’t want to stop being a child.  Children are the only real people in the world.  In Religious Studies, we learned about how Buddhists believe there are six kinds of creature you can be reincarnated as: humans, gods, demigods, hungry ghosts, beings in hell, and animals.  Humans are the ones who stand the best chance of reaching enlightenment, because we experience both happiness (unlike the hungry ghosts and the beings in hell) and unhappiness (unlike the gods and demigods), and we’re more intelligent than animals so we can think about what we experience.

Well, I think humans go through phases of being three or four different creatures.  We start off as children, and then we get turned into teenagers, but if we’re lucky we can go to university and be students for a few years, and then we’re just grown-ups for the rest of our lives. 

Children are the only ones who are really alive, because we have minds and intelligence and imagination, and that’s why Jesus likes children best.  He said, ‘Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them!  For the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.  Truly I tell you, anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’

But Paul wrote, ‘When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways.’

So we can’t avoid growing up – but when we grow up, we have to stop being the people Jesus likes and allows into heaven.  In Sunday School, we used to sing, ‘Jesus loves the little children,’ but there was nothing about him loving teenagers.

It’s like in Peter Pan, where you’re banished from Never-Neverland if you grow up, or in the Narnia stories, where people aren’t allowed to go on coming back to Narnia when they’re too grown-up.  Or it’s like in The Little Prince, where it says that grown-ups don’t understand anything except numbers and money.

There have to be grown-ups, to look after children and protect us, and do the work so that children don’t have to.  I don’t know why there have to be teenagers, except to give grown-ups a minority group that they’re allowed to hate, now that people are starting to realise that it’s wrong to hate people for being Jewish or Pakistani or Irish.

The only good thing about growing up is that if you work hard at school and pass GCSEs and A-levels, you can go to university, and that’s like an extra three years of childhood, but with complete freedom, without parents around to tell you what to do.  Most people become students when they’re eighteen, but my dad went to university when he was in his forties, so he suddenly had lots of cool student friends who used to come and hang out at our house or invite my dad out to the pub with them.  Dad was having a lot more fun when he was a student than when he worked in his old job, and it made him more fun for us, too.

So being a student looks good.  But when it’s over, you have to be a grown-up for the rest of your life and just work until you get old, and there’s nothing to look forward to ever again.

It’s like in a science fiction story I read, where there are creatures who are sapient and telepathic when they’re in the womb, so that they can learn about the world through their mother’s senses, but they suffer massive brain damage in being born, so that they are left as mindless killing machines with no thoughts to distract them from constantly having to fight everything around them in order to survive. 

The story was about a team of surgeons delivering a baby by caesarean section, so that she could be born without losing her mind.  I wish that was possible in real life.  What’s the point in having minds, if we have to lose them when we grow up?

Yours,

Phantom of the Library