Age Appropriate Activities

telesilla:

So this post, another in a long series of “find a bridge club you embarrassing old ladies” posts, came around. And I adulted hard all day and it just really pissed me off and caught me at a bad time. 

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I was active in the SCA. For those that don’t know it, the Society for Creative Anachronism is a Medieval and Renaissance  reenactment group. They’re super serious about research and authenticity, but there’s a lot of crossover with the organized science fiction and fantasy fandom community and most of them are nerds in other ways as well.

So, I’m 30 and it’s Thanksgiving, of course, because doesn’t stuff like this always happen at Thanksgiving? My 60 year old uncle asked me and my then-husband when we were…”going to grow up, settle down* and stop playing dress up.” And I felt fucking awful, because I’d always thought he was cool when I was a kid, and I loved my aunt, and he was doing this in front of my teenaged cousin and, on top of it all, my parents were at the table too.

And my mom looked over at her big brother and said, “Knock it off. Do you know how cool it is and how much fun it is to dress up and go to one of their events?” Because my 55 year old mom had, in fact, been to one of our events where she cracked up all my geeky friends by quoting Monty Python.  

So yeah, my awesome mom had our back and my uncle shut up and my cousin asked my husband if making real armor and fighting in it was hard. It went as well as these things could have. But I was lucky. Plenty of friends had that conversation with their parents without anyone sticking up for them. 

Time for one more short story. When I was in my 40s, a very very close friend of mine–same age–told me that my writing was really good but I was wasting my time and talent by writing only fanfic. Now her dad was a writer and her step-mom was a writer and I knew she was paying me a big compliment. It still stung. Fanfic was pretty much keeping me sane at the time and I’d told her that more than once, but…I was “wasting my time and talent.”

Look I get being afraid of adulting and I understand that having older people in your fandom space embarrasses you and makes you think about ageing when you’d rather not, but it’s their pastime too and if you try to make it about young people’s fun vs old people’s fun, you’re gonna turn into my uncle. Be my mom instead. Teach your kids that you’re never too old to love something silly just because you love it. Teach your parents the same lesson if you need to. 

Grow up on your own terms, not someone elses.

*we both had low income, low status, office jobs, no kids and didn’t own our own house.  Sound familiar?