Defining a False Sense of Maturity

Recently, I wanted to write a book which I called,

Approaching 40: A Girl’s Woman’s Guide to Impending Maturity (aka How to Define Maturity at your Advanced Age)

This book never came to fruition but I did come up with some chapter ideas that I think, if nothing else, define my state of mind (for better or for worse).

1. Coffee – Drinking coffee gives me a false sense of maturity.
2.  Husbands – Taking your maturity level down a few notches.
   
3.  Mothers-In-Law – Subtract two points from your maturity score if you have a mother-in-law (four if she lives in the same town and six if she’s just down the road).
   
4.  Children - Having children is no excuse for inflating one’s maturity level.
   
5.  Inevitability – Suddenly realizing you are just like your mother is very humbling, indeed.
   
6.  Legacy – Skewed-maturity is inescapably passed from one generation to the next. 
7. Inevitability Redux – The things your kids will call each other up and say, “You’ll  never guess what mom did again…”
8.  Money – Gotta have it, will fight about it, and we will never quite have as much as we want.
9. At Home Moms – Staying home is no excuse for abusing the coffee-maturity connection.
10. Working Moms – A working mother’s maturity conflicts.
11. Keeping House – To work or not to work: True maturity is realizing that, no matter what, you still have to do it all… It’s all an illusion, just like your maturity.
12. Music – Listening to classical music in mixed company will give you the illusion of maturity. Listening to obscure 80’s music around aging Gen-Xers will give you class.
13. Television – Make sure you Tivo regularly records Weeds and Grey’s Anatomy so you’ll look cool even if you aren’t.
14. Spirituality – Your level of spirituality will depend on to whom you are speaking.
15. Teenagers – Your kids will grow up despite every effort to thwart it. 
16. Body – It droops… get over it.
17. Achieving Maturity – The hunt for this illusive game is endless. However, turning 40 gives one the delusion of maturity.
18. What next? Realizing, at least ten years before the fact, that the children will leave the house and you will be faced with filling in the blank.
19. Caring – It really sucks.
20. What I unlearned from my Mother – We will always be unlearning what our mothers taught us.

Hopefully, you will take this for a tongue-and-cheek rendering of a lot of what I experience in the world. There is truth in everything people say and for me, it helps me to deal with it all by giving it a humorous tone. How else is one supposed to handle the existence of a mother-in-law? (Sorry Vicki! Your'e wonderful!)