#growing-up — Public Fediverse posts

Growing up is realizing...
The best seat in the house is the one nearest the electric fan.
#GrowingUp #FilipinoLife #EverydayHumor

My 17 yr old son just landed his first after school job! So happy for him! #GrowingUp #FirstJob #DayInTheLife

Ape

Today my daughter walks into the room after banging her head on the floor because our indoor swing tipped backwards.

She is wearing a towel around her shoulders and strutting like she thinks she is Queen Elizabeth.

Her hair is a frizzy mess all over her head. Last night’s plait loosely pulled together behind.

“Mama,” she says, in her most important voice, “What a wonderful day”

“Certainly is,” I reply.

“Today I am wearing a ape”

“An ape?”

“Yes. Because I am a Queen.”

“Ah. You mean a cape?”

“No. Definitely not a cape. I am wearing a ape.”

Ok girlie. Wear your ape. Enjoy your wonderful day. Isn’t it magical being five?

A quotation from Terence

DEMEA: No one has ever plotted out his life’s plan so successfully that he never faces
   New challenges and discoveries brought about by circumstances, the passing of time,
   Or experience itself. Inevitably, you discover you don’t know what you thought you did,
   And the principles we first formed don’t hold up in the face of everyday practice.
 
[Nunquam ita quisquam bene subducta ratione ad vitam fuit
Quia res, Ætas usus semper aliquid apportet novi
Aliquid moneat, ut illa, quæ te scire credas, nescias
Et, quæ tibi putaris prima, in experiundo ut repudies.]

Terence (186?-159 BC) African-Roman dramatist [Publius Terentius Afer]
Adelphoe [Adelphoi; Adelphi; The Brothers], Act 5, sc. 4, l. 855ff (160 BC) [tr. Christenson (2010), Sc. 22]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/terence/85152/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #terence #challenge #challenges #change #changeofmind #circumstance #conduct #control #experience #growingup #ignorance #illumination #maturity #passageoftime #presuppositions #principles #reallife #realitycheck #theories #theory

Bevor wir werden

👉 https://whisper7.substack.com/p/bevor-wir-werden

#Philosophie #Psychologie #Identität #Erwachsenwerden #Entwicklung

Before We Become

👉 https://whisper7.substack.com/p/before-we-become

#Philosophy #Psychology #Identity #GrowingUp #PersonalGrowth

I wrote a poem about when I got divorced and had to move in with my folks for a few months, and what it was like being in that old neighborhood. Lots of memories. Very relatable. Enjoy.

#poem #poetry #poems #writing #reading #poetrycommunity #ampoet #memory #nostalgia #growingup #amreading

https://patrickwmarshauthor.wordpress.com/2026/07/22/that-old-neighborhood-a-poem-about-memory-change-and-nostalgia/

That Old Neighborhood: A Poem About Memory, Change, and Nostalgia

The stoplight, tall and ivy-wrapped
beside the solemn intersection
pierced with headlight spears and glitter.
The nearby overpass a floating slab
marked by howling trucks we’d
dream of buying when we got older.

Further up by Joe’s house,
the streetlight dangled an orange crown
perfect for us to wrestle, throw baseballs
yell at semis, and occasionally talk
as if nobody were listening
when only our dreams were there to speak.

Down the block was the strip mall,
a half-empty brown-brick mushroom where
Mario’s Movies was a red-carpet beacon
of games, videos, stale candy, and pornography.
We’d sneak glances of that skin
before any of us knew how it felt.

Across Highway 10 a few miles west
our high school field with rattling bleachers,
sweaty football lights, and ribbons of moth clouds.
Prematurely bald Collin would heckle
the visiting cheerleaders who yelled back:
“You’re too old-looking to be in high school.”

Now, two decades done and dead,
I’m alone and visiting again.
There is less and less
magic to those memories
haunting the same dark nights.
Still, I walk these streets

to feel something.

This morning's conversation in the car is brought to you by almost-14yo's question "How do you ask somebody out?"

Lordy lordy, here we go. 😣😆

#8thGraderLife
#GrowingUp
#TeensToday
#ParentProblems?
#parenting

Question: What’s something that you hated and couldn't stand as a kid, but Love as an adult?

#ChildhoodDislikes #AdultPreferences #GrowingUp #ChangingTastes #LifePerspective #UnexpectedLoves #Nostalgia #Maturity #LifeLessons #EvolvingOpinions

#Growingup in the #socialmedia #age

#Policypaper #OECD #Digital #Economy #Papers

OECD (2026), “Growing up in the social media age”, OECD Digital Economy Papers, No. 385, OECD Publishing, Paris, doi.org/10.1787/a113....

www.oecd.org/en/publicati...

Growing up in the social media...

It's weird that the news has to tell us this simple truth. If we want kids not to be hooked on tech, we have to provide alternatives.
#tech #education #growingup #3rdspace #AI
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2026/07/05/teens-using-ai-chatbots-emotional-support-mental-health-issues/90752807007/

I walk, or: Carrying less

A Sijo

sandals, Middle Eastern tan lines
earbuds playing Billy Joel;
the old words sound and sound right
yet their teenage listener has blurred;
midlife's now loosening its grip
I walk on, carrying less

Sijo?

A Korean verse form related to haiku and tanka and comprised of three lines of 14-16 syllables each, for a total of 44-46 syllables. Each line contains a pause near the middle, similar to a caesura, though the break need not be metrical. The first half of the line contains six to nine syllables; the second half should contain no fewer than five. Originally intended as songs, sijo can treat romantic, metaphysical, or spiritual themes. Whatever the subject, the first line introduces an idea or story, the second supplies a “turn,” and the third provides closure. Modern sijo are sometimes printed in six lines.

Let’s write poetry together!

When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone – it’s possible. But creatively, it’s more like painting: you can’t just use the same colours in every painting. It’s just not an option. You can’t take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.

–Ben Harper (b. 1969)

Would you like to create poetry with me and have a completed poem of yours featured here at the Skeptic’s Kaddish? I am very excited to have launched the ‘Poetry Partners’ initiative and am looking forward to meeting and creating with you… Check it out!

Growing up #queer and #Muslim in Britain, the future often felt like a blank page. Not because I lacked imagination, but because I lacked examples.
https://medium.com/prismnpen/growing-up-queer-and-muslim-i-spent-years-imagining-the-future-ec5a1928df4f?sk=c2d3e380ea21603d05e37f3887c17ede

#LGBTQ #GrowingUp #UKPolitics #Representation #Belonging

🙅 Do you remember how scary the idea of growing up was? Well, US researchers say we should eventually grow out of our fears

✨Follow the link for more information on this story✨
https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/afraid-to-grow-up-it-gets-less-scary-over-time

#science #sciencenews #research #stem #facts #knowledge #sciencefacts #growingup #millennial #GenX #babyboomers

What Didn’t Move

Finding home in a year when nothing stayed the same

As America approaches its 250th birthday, I’ve found myself thinking back to 1976—a year of celebration, constant change, and a quiet search for something steady. This is a story about the houses we lived in, the friendships that held, and what I came to understand about home.

*****

“I can’t hear you!” Mrs. Francis yelled from the back of the room, cupping her hand around the back of her ear until I spoke loudly enough to earn her thumbs-up.

Day after day, practice after practice, I learned to project my voice for that approval—to fill a room, to reach the back row, to be heard.

But today wasn’t practice. It was our first and only performance of Fruitville Elementary’s musical celebrating America’s bicentennial, and Mrs. Francis was frantic behind the stage, not steady in the cafetorium’s rear. In front of the entire school—students, teachers, and parents, I began the opening narration of Sing, America, Sing.

“Sing, America, Sing!” I boomed, using the same energy Mrs. Francis had demanded.

I was standing behind a microphone—for the first time.

At my booming entry, the audience leaned away as one. I was too loud, uncomfortably so—for them and for my fifth-grade self-esteem.

Red-faced, I lowered my voice: “Sing of the past and the present, of peace and war…”

I finished my first lines and shrank from the mic, suddenly unsure not just how loud to be, but how to belong in the space that heard me.

I was one of several student narrators cycling to the microphone during the play, all of us varying in height. My next lines followed a sixth-grade boy significantly shorter than me. He walked away from the mic stand without raising it. Again, embarrassment.

Being a 10-year-old girl taller than a boy a year older was humiliating enough. Walking toward the too-short microphone made it worse.

Or might have, if not for a classmate who stepped in front of me, raising the mic and giving me an encouraging smile as I walked to say my lines. His kindness made all the difference.

For weeks on end, the fifth- and sixth-grade classes rotated through music and art classes with one aim: Sing, America, Sing, an American heritage pageant featuring music that told our country’s story as we celebrated its birthday. We practiced songs and lines in music class; in art, we created props and scenery. Together, we made a quilt commemorating America’s birthday, each of us embroidering a single square.

*****

The year 1976 was filled with celebration, and today, as we near our country’s 250th anniversary, I find my mind returning to that patriotic world.

At church, the children’s choir members wore colonial clothing and sang patriotic songs. We even rode in a covered wagon during Sarasota’s parade.

It began, for me, with a tin can of candy fruit drops, long since emptied but still treasured. We sold them as a school fundraiser, and that tin decorated my childhood bedroom, beginning a love of tin containers that still grace my dining room today.

“This land is your land,” we sang. “This land is my land…”

Fifth grade was when I longed for my family to have “a land” of our own—even rented land. Over the previous year, we moved three times, across two school districts.

I had lived my first seven years in one house in Mercerville, New Jersey, but when my father was transferred to Sarasota, Florida, everything I knew was upended—repeatedly—when he left his position with RCA, changed jobs, and we moved, nearly every year. Always within Sarasota County.

As the youngest of five children, I was shielded from the reasons we were moving—money problems, I believed, even then—but my mother had a knack for making even the most ill-fitting house downgrade an exciting proposition for the Souders family. My parents would move us 13 more times before I turned 20—14 more if you count the campsite we lived at for one summer while we waited for a house.

But I didn’t know about any of those future moves in 1974. I only knew moving meant changing schools. My older sister Trish and I would attend Southside Elementary, riding together on a bicycle fitted with a banana seat, the nearly two miles to school. Most days we chose to walk, an easier choice when wearing backpacks, despite the distance.

Though the house we rented was nice, it was too small for our family of seven, so Mom converted the two-car garage into a bedroom for my older brothers, Jack and Scott. And by “converted,” I mean she put their bedroom furniture in a garage, and there they stayed—even when my oldest sister Cyndi left her room vacant when she went away to college.

In November, though my parents scrimped and saved as much as they could, they realized they couldn’t afford this house. In their search for something better, my mom found Mrs. Carey, an older lady who had a small house on 25 acres west of town.

We moved in time to celebrate Christmas in Mrs. Carey’s too-small farmhouse on Tatum Ridge Road. This one didn’t have enough bedrooms—or a garage. My two brothers were relegated to the living room.

It was in yet another new school district, but Mom drove us to Southside so we wouldn’t have to switch midyear.

On the country road, my parents fancied themselves farmers—purchasing chicks, a baby pig, and day-old calves from the dairy. We bottle-fed calves, housed chicks in the barn, and kept Pumpkin the pig with our neighbor’s pigs in his palmetto-filled pen.

I still picture our neighbor Steve Dane throwing himself into those bushes trying to catch the largest pig. Why, I don’t remember, but the sight of that heavyset man flinging himself after them has stayed with me. We lined up along the hog wire fence, cheering.

Those six or seven months were the fullest of our lives. We captured loose horses, raised steers and chickens, befriended neighbors, and welcomed a stray hound and her seven puppies, who took up residence beneath our house. I even watched a horse give birth.

I could have lived there forever. But half a year into our lease, the landlady died, and we had to move again.

By mid-June, we were in our third house since the previous August. The moves, exciting as Mom made them out to be, took their toll.

“Mom?” I said over the phone one night. “I don’t feel well. Could you come get me?”

It was nearly nine. I’d gone home with a new friend after a day at the county’s Lido Beach Summer Recreation program. But as bedtime approached, I grew physically ill.

Homesick.

For what, I couldn’t say. Certainly, not a place—I had none that felt like home.

My family? Friends? In addition to new homes, I was also making new friends because my best friend was no longer allowed to play with me. Her mother decided she was immature—and it was my fault, since I was nearly a year younger. She tore her daughter abruptly from my life.

That homesickness threatened every new friendship I tried to build.

That third house—where we celebrated the nation’s centennial—sat in an orange grove, isolated from neighbors. We had enough pastureland to keep Fert and Lizer, the two steers we’d raised from babies, and a chicken coop built around a sprawling old oak tree.

I climbed that tree often, settling on a long branch that stretched into a horse pasture to read or write. As horses scratched their backs against it, I bounced along, my journal writing turning jagged.

It was great fun.

We had cats and kittens, dogs and puppies—and one large chicken that roamed freely because the others bullied her. We named her Chicken.

For our kindness, she turned on us, attacking whenever we stepped outside. We carried brooms for protection, and when she ended up on our dinner plates, I was both sorry and not sorry. She was the toughest bird we’d ever eaten and the only one of our animals that my parents admitted to slaughtering and cooking.

The girl who named each animal on our farm as if it were a pet, I preferred not to know when we were eating one of them.

(Our two steers went to the slaughterhouse, eventually, but my parents insisted the meat we ate wasn’t theirs. When a chicken stopped laying and then mysteriously disappeared from the coop, my parents blamed foxes.)

*****

The day after my 10th birthday in August, I entered yet another new school—this time with Trish, who was starting junior high. I walked our winding, tree-lined driveway to Fruitville Road, then along the road to catch the bus with boys I didn’t know.

Fear kept me silent—until I walked into my class and saw Cindy, a friend I knew from earlier years at Phillipi Shores Elementary. She was new to Fruitville, too.

We greeted each other as if we’d never been apart and soon gathered the other girls into our circle. Cindy and I went from class to class together, joined the Girl Scout troop, and became immediate best friends.

Under the protective umbrella of her friendship, I spent nights at her house and even went to Girl Scout camp without an inkling of homesickness. I developed friendships that didn’t disappear overnight.

Those bonds—and the year’s celebration of America’s birthday—gave everything a warm glow.

Our homeroom was the art room, and we moved from classroom to classroom for other subjects throughout the day. Like moving from house to house, I carried my people with me. Though the rooms and teachers changed, I was anchored in my friendship with Cindy and the others.

*****

That year, everything celebrated the United States of America. It was her 200th birthday, after all.

We sang about land we claimed as ours, even as I lived in houses that never quite were.

That year, I began to understand something I hadn’t known how to name: home wasn’t the orange grove or the farmhouse or the garage-turned-bedroom.

It was what didn’t move—the familiar face in a new classroom, the girls who formed a circle wide enough to include me, and the voice that, for the first time, didn’t need to shout to be heard—because, for once, it felt like it had one.

Even if it took a microphone—and some awkward moments—to realize it.

Have you ever had a season where everything changed—but something important held steady?

Childhood Beliefs: When the Moon Follows You

https://legawa.com/2026/06/27/childhood-beliefs-when-the-moon-follows-you/

I came across a man who was eight years older than me. We exchanged albums, spoke for a couple of days, and then one day I received a message from him saying that he was alone at home and inviting me over.
https://medium.com/prismnpen/as-an-18-year-old-gay-i-didnt-understand-that-consent-isn-t-a-one-time-decision-c8feb6d5ce8d

#LGBTQ #Gay #Consent #GrowingUp

Job Title: Yes (Other Duties as Assigned)

https://xinkblotz.com/2026/06/22/job-title-yes-other-duties-as-assigned/

Don’t Follow Anyone

We need to support our children and youth, as they navigate a difficult world. Belief in oneself is the key.

He looked at me in disbelief. I was sure it was because I had really thrown him with my comeback, but in reality, it was because he had never in his life seen a person practically begging to be beaten up.
https://medium.com/prismnpen/a-gay-boy-a-bully-and-the-weight-of-a-history-book-a76d381a1e84

#LGBTQ #Gay #GrowingUp #Texas

https://www.meowmoe.com/231857/ 激しい雨の中、道端で一人ぼっちだった子猫を救いました #保護猫 #子ネコ #感動 #AdoptedCat #CatStory #GrowingUp #kitten #neko #RainyDayRescue #RescueCat #SmallVideo #StrayCat #TinyKitten #保護猫 #初めてのお散歩 #初めてのお風呂 #奇跡 #子猫 #感動 #成長記録 #救出 #猫のいる暮らし #癒し #雨の日

Head and Feet Blues (SONG)

One of my favorites when Jeremiahs Run was still performing live.

This is a story about a man who split himself in two.
One part stayed the same the other just grew and grew.
One part stayed in one place, the other up and joined the ratrace.
He had his head in one place and his feet in another.

Head in one place feet in another. You got your head in one place, your feet in another. Your heart’s disconnected one way or the other. Head in one place feet in another.

The part that never changed was always true,
it was always old and the growing part was always new.
While one part was dying from entropy the other part was dying from too much speed,
Head in one place feet in another.

Head in one place feet in another. You got your head in one place, your feet in another. Your heart’s disconnected one way or the other. Head in one place feet in another.

I heard a story about a man who split himself in two.
One part stayed the same, the other just grew and grew.
I got to wondering when the story was through which part was me and which part was you.
Head in one place feet in another

Head in one place feet in another. You got your head in one place, your feet in another. Your heart’s disconnected one way or the other. Head in one place feet in another.

Song written October 27, 1998

The older I get, the more competency becomes an appreciated trait.

#age #growingup

⏳ You appreciate stories that create nostalgia and make readers reflect on their own lives.

https://httpsknowverse.wordpress.com/2026/05/31/%e2%8f%b3-you-appreciate-stories-that-create-nostalgia-and-make-readers-reflect-on-their-own-lives-2/

⏳ You appreciate stories that create nostalgia and make readers reflect on their own lives.

https://httpsknowverse.wordpress.com/2026/05/31/%e2%8f%b3-you-appreciate-stories-that-create-nostalgia-and-make-readers-reflect-on-their-own-lives/

⏳ You appreciate stories that create nostalgia and make readers reflect on their own lives.

https://httpsknowverse.wordpress.com/2026/05/31/%e2%8f%b3-you-appreciate-stories-that-create-nostalgia-and-make-readers-reflect-on-their-own-lives-3/

I admitted today, over a meal at home with wine, that my personal recollection of the Biblical Ten Commandments had faded.
First to my mind were some of the negatives - killing, adultery, and coveting thy neighbour's ass.
So, without peeking, can you get up to the full 10??
[Link to King James version because that was current when I was being taken to CoE church.]
#morality #GrowingUp
https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/ten-commandments_bible/