You'll Understand When You're Older

Adults know things that children don't.

Things they shouldn't know.

"You'll understand when you're older."

Why is the sun still up while you are forced to go to bed?

When you simply can't get everything in the store,

a child's greed, apparently, requires a lecture.

A grown man's silence never does.

What happens when your crush says they like you, then flips the script?

Shifts focus to someone new. How life's not fair.

Funny how "not fair" gets explained to children

and never to the men who make it that way.

--

"You'll understand when you're older"

Shifts to mean stop asking questions.

Do as I say and not as I do.

When wisdom isn't there, and distance falls on silence instead,

silence being cheaper than honesty.

When you have to walk on alert at all times.

When you have to wear shorts under dresses and skirts.

When your body has to be covered when that one someone comes over to the house.

You don't understand why someone flinches when that uncle touches them.

Why apologies happen behind closed doors,

the kind that fix nothing, but make excellent soundproofing.

You don't understand why everyone notices, but nobody says anything.

You're told you will understand later.

Later is doing a lot of work here.

--

"You'll understand when you're older"

Now means:

You'll excuse this too, one day.

The line will become the inheritance,

stamped across your face.

People will hand it down like debt given, and yet,

Nobody remembers taking out.

Forced to pay back by people who never agreed to the terms.

You watch the adults defend the things they once hated.

Amazed by the things you'll simply forgive because "it's family."

For once, you're the one who will need forgiving.

--

"You'll understand when you're older"

But now you're older.

You understand the stress.

You understand the exhaustion.

You understand fear.

You realize none of those things explain the cruelty.

It's funny how understanding arrived right on schedule

for everything except the part that mattered. Really mattered.

--

"You'll understand when you're older"

Older to whom?

Older than the child forced to go to bed before the sky was.

Older than the child forced to cover up

or dealing with unwelcome hands.

No.

You're older now.

Old enough to see the line for what it was:

Not wisdom, like you thought it was.

But silenced, rehearsed and passed down from mouth to mouth.

A family secret that nobody has the stomach to throw out.

You'll understand when you're older, they still say.

When you finally do.

It was never about your age.

It was about their alibi.