When I was a kid, I looked forward to maturity.

Not old age, mind you. Maturity. When you could stay up as late as you wanted with no one to tell you otherwise. Eat dessert first if you wanted. Drink hot chocolate and read all day.

Maturity, when you’d become a poised, confident, serene woman, instead of an often-clumsy, tentative, ‘fraidy-cat child.

So when is this maturity supposed to arrive? ‘Cos it hasn’t yet, and I’d have thought it should have by now.

Take the other night for example.

I’d driven my mom somewhere and pulled into the driveway expecting to push the button on her rear view mirror that would open the garage door. It didn’t work.

‘Where’s your actual remote control?’ I asked.

‘Inside the house,’ Mom said.

Great. Since the front storm door was latched, one of us was going to have to traipse around to the back door and through the house to get to the garage.

‘I’ll go,’ Mom volunteered.

Sure. Who wants to be responsible for an 80-year-old woman stumbling around in the dark, trying to open a door?

‘Let me,’ I insisted (and she didn’t try to talk me out of it!)

I left the car and approached the gate (the same one the yard man seemed to “forget” to close earlier). After several attempts to unlatch it, I grew irritated when it refused to open.

Glancing around, I decided I’d simply hop (!) over the fence.

No big deal. I’d hopped many a fence when I was a kid.

No chain-link fences, but what difference could that make?

Ditto for not being thirteen any more.

So I threw one leg over the top of the fence but found I had no toe-hold. My jeans leg and boot got caught in the top of the fencing and, before I could blink, one leg was suspended mid-air while the rest of me was scrambling around in the damp, muddy grass!

Such poise. Such grace. Such bravado.

Such maturity.

I’m fortunate I didn’t break something. Shoot, I’m fortunate it was dark and the neighbors weren’t glued to their windows!