Second Puberty Is No Joke, Y’all

Second puberty is a real thing that hits in your forties, and you’ll never be the same again. It’s a lot like first puberty in that regard, but without all the awkward bits around girls. Unless, of course, you still haven’t figured out how to talk to women by the time you reach middle age, in which case you probably spend your time joining social media movements and aggressively overusing hashtags like #notallmen to get your point across, but that’s a whole pathology I don’t have time to get into right now.

Before I get started about everything that goes into second puberty, let me first clear up a simple misconception: second puberty happens during middle age, not in your early 30s. I guess it’s fun to joke about if you work for Buzzfeed and are looking for something to publish/steal from College Humor, but it’s not actually a thing when you’re that young. It just isn’t. All that’s happening there is adjusting to the awfulness of being an adult. It is, after all, nothing at all like any of us were promised when we were kids, so I have a feeling a lot of thirty-somethings are just coming to grips with how much being a grown-up sucks.

Spoiler Alert: It never gets any better.

Actual second puberty goes way beyond just not feeling like an unstoppable twenty-something god anymore. Your body literally starts going through a second round of changes that are inexplicably a lot like the first round of changes, but without all of the rest of your life to look forward to when it’s over. Some things people like to call second puberty are really just normal parts of getting older. Sure, your hairline recedes and you start growing unwanted body hair, but comedians have been making jokes about those things for years, usually sandwiched between hilarious and super original bits regarding the differences between men and women and about how Florida looks like America’s penis. Aging isn’t second puberty, though.

Sidenote: For the record, my hairline still hasn’t receded, so I guess I’ve got that going for me. Unfortunately, while I don’t yet have to spend time doing weird things like mastering the intricacies of a 20-point combover, I do have to get my hair cut all the time. All. The. Time.

It hasn’t even started thinning yet, which might sound like I’m bragging, but you have no idea. Instead of losing my hair like a normal person, it just started multiplying like I was injecting my scalp with Bob Ross growth hormones. Like, the left side of my head must be really fertile soil for hair trees or whatever, because it grows like crazy on that side. It grows like crazy all over my head, to be honest, but by the time I go in for a haircut, there are pockets of hair that are so much longer and puffier than others, that I always have to provide the barber with a reference photo of what it’s supposed to look like before he powers up the weed whacker and gets to work.I also don’t have unwanted body hair yet, which is probably a blessing. That said, I still don’t have wanted body hair yet, as my chest is basically a blank canvas upon which god hath not yet painted. Which isn’t a bad thing, really. Some guys manscape chest hair away like they’re trying to shave 0.002 seconds off their Olympic swim time, and I don’t even have to wax. So that’s nice.

What I do have are all the hallmarks of first puberty coming back with a vengeance:

• My voice cracks.
• I get pimples.
• I have days where I’m oddly clumsy, and I’m knocking things over like I’m not used to having arms.
• I get ridiculously emotional over stupid things.
• I have angst.

There are more, but let’s just tackle these for now.

First up: my voice.

I don’t know exactly when it started happening again, but every so often my voice will crack in the exact same way it did when I was a teen and my entire family would tease me about it around the dinner table. Sometimes, I’ll just be casually talking about nothing with my wife, and it’ll happen. Other times, I’m singing in the car – quite beautifully, I assure you – and when I reach for that one note, my voice runs the other way. I don’t know why this is a thing again, but my own kid is slouching toward puberty himself, so at least it gives us some common ground to talk about, even if we sound like startled chipmunks when we do.

As for the pimples, they’re not usually noticeable because I work hard to maintain a standard amount of beard stubble at all times. I’ve done this for years, since the only thing separating my 43-year-old face from my 15-year-old face is some small amount of facial hair. Honestly, without the stubble, I’ll still get carded for a lottery ticket. I’ve never been one for Grizzly Adams/hipster beards though, and even though I went through an unfortunate, carefully-shaped Riker beard phase I don’t like to talk about, I’m not really a fan of normal beards, either. Just give me some stubble, a little 5 o’clock shadow, and I’m good. There are, however, problems with this.To begin with, I wasn’t joking about that whole 43 to 15 thing. I have plenty of grey in my beard, which instantly sends me to middle age the second I let the stubble grow just a little too long. I prefer to call it platinum blonde, even though I know it’s a lie and I’m not fooling anyone. It makes me feel better though, which is another thing that happens during second puberty: you start lying to yourself.

When the same brand of jeans you’ve been buying in the same size for decades slowly stop fitting and you lack the upper body strength necessary to bring the top button in line, you don’t immediately blame all the cookies you’ve been eating to keep the loneliness birds away. Nope, you tell yourself that Levi’s must’ve changed its sizing parameters, so what used to be a 28 waist is now a 30. A few years later, they’ll change it again, and 32 will be the new 30, then 34, and so on…

When all those cool t-shirts you bought over the years start stretching their designs in weird places, you’ll blame years of going through the wash for shrinking them long before you’ll admit that the real reason Captain America’s round shield has slowly become more of an oval is because you just like to eat, dang it. Nothing wrong with that.

All the lies that become your life add up as you move through second puberty, until you either accept the hand time has dealt you, or you try to fight back with exercise programs and diet fads that promise to recapture your youthful vigor if you’ll just become a partner in the multi-level marketing scheme a girl you knew in high school keeps promoting as a “premium lifestyle” on Facebook.

I’ve just accepted it. It’s cheaper that way.Getting back to my list, I’ve also become ridiculously clumsy. I trip over my own feet like they’ve grown two sizes overnight, and I knock things over with my torso tentacles more often that I manage to successfully grab a can of soda and drink it like a normal person. (Which, now that I’m opening up to you, I manage to spill down my chin more often than I’d like to admit because I guess I’ve forgotten how gravity works.) This same awkwardness happened after every growth spurt during first puberty, but I have no clue why it’s happening again. I don’t think my arms and legs are still growing, but I haven’t actually measured any part of my body in a long time. Ignorance is, as they say, bliss. And I prefer to remain as ignorant of my body’s latest changes for as long as possible.

Which brings me to the emotional turmoil of second puberty. Maybe this is more down to me being a parent than it is to any sort of biological changes, but movies I watched years ago that I mocked for having cliched subplots about sick kids now overwhelm my emotions in ways I never thought possible. I can’t even watch Lorenzo’s Oil or The Road anymore, for example. I mean that literally, too. I am physically incapable of finishing either movie because, at some point, I will start crying, which will burn my eyes and make them tear up even more until I have to walk away and splash some cold water on my face to make it stop.

Don’t even get me started on Pixar movies, either. If you want to see what an emotional trainwreck looks like in a middle-aged man, just start up the last few minutes of Toy Story 3 and I’ll be right with you.As for the sudden resurgence in teenage angst, I’m not entirely sure that actually has anything to do with second puberty, now that I think about it. Yes, I have mornings when I wake up angry and spend the rest of the day feeling like no one understands me, but come on. It’s 2018, I live in the Deep South, and Donald Trump is President. If you spent every waking moment of your life feeling like you were in the Upside Down, you’d get pretty angsty, too.

As long as I don’t start writing poetry, I’ll probably be fine.

Probably…

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll find it and plenty more in my book,  A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions.

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NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

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