Second adolescence

 First published in Column 8 on the 29^th April 1992

Everyone has heard of second childhood. However, this may be preceded by an earlier stage in people’s lives – particularly men’s – which we could class as Second Adolescence.

It’s a time when you play roughhouse with the kids and within minutes are puffing and panting. You’re so exhausted your arm muscles have turned to jelly, and you’re not even strong enough to lift the remote control to turn of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

It’s a time when your weight hasn’t merely gained ground on you, it’s shifted location, and now waddles along in front, giving the impression that in a few months you’ll go into labour.

I’ll never forget the day I first realised my body line had altered. I was in the Moray Place Post Office. In those days its design was Fancy Metallic, with reflections flung from all angles.

While waiting in the queue, I glanced up and saw some character dressed in clothes that looked remarkably like mine. Even the face was familiar. The only difference was that this person had a much more rounded front that mine.

I was not impressed on second glance to realise it was me, and wondered where I could go to get a quick corset job.

These days I avoid checking my reflection in shop windows, or standing sideways in front of the bathroom mirror. Anyway, inside I still see myself as the straight-up-and-down sort of person I used to be.

Second adolescence is a time when you can be charming with the experience of 40 years one minute, and a grizzling, whining, pitiful, blubbering booby the next. As your tears drop on to the dishes in the sink, your wife will ask, which do you prefer, death or divorce?

During second adolescence your friends always seem to have appointments on the other side of town.

Your body and brain are curiously uncoordinated: forgetting the names of people you’ve known for years, missing your mouth when eating, and generally trying to convince yourself that you haven’t really been in residence for nearly half a century.

I never had the pangs of first adolescence. In my teens I led a charmed existence, and all the ‘normal’ rigours of those years passed me by. I’m making up for it now, it seems.

Second adolescence is the time when you ‘Want to Break Free,’ and rebel against all the feelings of being utterly hemmed-in, only to find the mortgage must be paid today, the rates bill has just arrived in the post, the car is making a rumpity noise, three of the children have been told they’re going to camp in a fortnight and the fees have got to be at school today!

You open the chequebook and your conscience says you’ll have to stay in employment or there won’t be anything to cover the overdraft. All your Break Free desires go toddling away leaving you to struggle off to work on your own.

This is the time of life when you no longer possess a single item of clothing that you can call your own (except maybe your underpants). Your kids are all into larger sizes, and anything of yours that isn’t ‘gross’ will do. (If they think it’s gross, anyway, how can you bear to wear it in front of them?

Your only tracksuit trousers wind up in your son’s wardrobe by mistake, and he commandeers them because they ‘only need to be slightly rolled up at the bottom to fit.’

It’s a time when you think that getting up in the morning will probably initiate World War III, so you lie there until everybody’s ready to leave. World War III, however, is only waiting for you to arise.

It’s a time when you feel crumply, stressed out, unwanted, useless, permanently tired, merely an appendage to the family unit. And just when you decided that enough is enough and any bit of rock will do to crawl under, one of the kids comes along and spontaneously says, ‘Dad, you’re magnificent.’

They tell me that Adolescence Part Two doesn’t last forever. Who knows, I might even be done with it by next week.

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