Four years to manhood

When I was a little boy… well, I hated it. I hated being a little boy.

I didn’t like being treated like a child, and I didn’t like being dependent on my parents for money, food, and transport. But I also hated the way I looked. I hated having boyish features, and I resented having a boy’s voice. I couldn’t wait for my voice change, to grow a beard, to have my own money, cars, and house. I couldn’t wait to be a man.

I speculated about what the ideal age for a man was, and I decided it was forty-four. When you’re forty-four, I reasoned, you’ve really arrived. You cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a boy, and you’ve had time to establish yourself. When you’re forth-four, you have a good career, your own money, etc. On the other hand, forty-four is not old. It’s not even close to retirement age.

I couldn’t wait to be forty four. To have just a touch of gray in my beard, and a deep baritone voice. Yes, forty-four.

As I got a little older, a panicky fear set in. My face remained smooth, my body remained boyish, and my voice remained gender-neutral, at best. I started to worry that I would become the first boy in history never to become a man. Medical science would be unable to account for it, but their attempts would draw the attrention to me from all the world. I’d be studied, and talked about, and, of course, mocked. My younger brothers would become men, and move away from home, and I’d continue living with my parents and getting an allowance of fifty cents a week.

Puberty did finally come. One day, during a regular inspection, I was hugely relived to find pubic hair was growing in.

That summer we lived in a camper in Flagstaff, Arizona for two weeks, and it was on the drive to Flagstaff that I learned that puberty came with a price that I hadn’t really considered. I was, suddenly – somewhere on Interstate 40 between Albuquerque and Flagstaff – struck by a new and clawing desire.

I felt like I might starve or suffocate, but I knew it wasn’t food or air that I needed. I found myself watching each car we passed very carefully, looking for a girl around my age. A girl. Hopefully one with the same desperate look on her face that I had on mine.

That did not happen.

My much coveted beard never happened either, a victim of genetics. But I eventually managed a mustache, and that’s been a satisfactory compromise. My voice changed to something I never expected but is nevertheless unlikely to be confused with a boy’s voice. And, in a wandering, accidental sort of way, I got a career.

And so today, on my fortieth birthday, I was pleased to have so many friends congratulate me, in person, by phone, and on-line (don’t put your birthday in Facebook if you’d like to keep it a secret, by the way.) Almost every one of them teased me about “hitting the big four oh”, or my life being half-way over, or having a mid-life crisis.

In fact I’m very happy to be forty. Only four more years to go, and I’ll finally be a man.