When Did You Feel Like an “Adult”?

Project 365, Day 79/365

When did you feel like an adult?” I asked him, driving down Santa Monica Boulevard toward the ocean. During quarantine, when our eyeballs are itching to see something other are our plaster walls and each other’s faces, we’ll hop in the car and drive toward the ocean. It’s a question I think about probably more often than most, at least it feels that way in my own mind. “I still don’t feel like an adult,” he responded.

Here we were, two very much adults in our mid-30s, and we still felt like kids. Sometimes, I think the older I get, the younger I feel. And I don’t mean that in a “free-spirited youth” kind of way. More in the sense that, to me, an “adult” is synonymous with someone who knows what they’re doing, someone who has answers. Me? I have guesses, sure, but answers? Ehh…

But again, as I get older, I think I realize that—surprise!—no one really does. You can know what you’re moving towards if you’re the plan-making, goal-setting type. But to know, I like to tell myself, that’s not an achievable task.

“I bet people feel like adults when they have kids.” That was my answer back. When you’re actually a kid, not just an adult who feels like one some days, the “grown ups” always felt so, well, grown. Being responsible for human life probably does that to you, I’m guessing. I sometimes stop and think of how grown my nephews must see me. I have a job, and a car, and a husband. I make grocery lists and plan meals for the week. I nearly figured out my own health insurance this time without calling my parents (I mean, I did mostly, I just wanted to talk through options with them, OKAY?!?). But in my mind, even though nearly 30 years separate us, we’re not that different.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if my parents feel like adults. That seems like a bit of a ridiculous question, yes, but there’s a chance I might be surprised by their answer.

Even just this weekend, I was talking to my mom, and she told me about a recurring dream she has. It was the first time I had ever heard this from her, but it boiled down to fearing being abandoned or left behind. We tend to put our parents on pedestals, imagine them as fearless, but there was something so girlish about her when she was telling me about the dream and how she’s had it for decades off and on. In the dream, my dad didn’t pick her up from work, and she was panicking. I said to her “Mom, in real life, what is the worst that would happen if your ride didn’t show up? You’d find your way home.” That’s what an adult would do, right? Just figure it out. She laughed, agreed, but her sweet vulnerability echoed my sense that even the adultiest adults maybe don’t always feel so adultish.

Maybe I don’t feel like a true adult because I regularly roll over to Charles in bed, tears filling my eyes, talking about how much I miss my mom and dad. Or because my adulthood looks so different than I thought it would. I have people I know from my high school that have children in high school right now. How is that possible, being that I graduated high school just a few years ago…in my mind. I hold a place in my memory for what it felt like as an elementary school girl waiting for Christmas. The weeks and months passed by painfully slow. So slow, things felt backward sometimes. Everything was so marked and distinct in my mind, now it’s all one big mush of information and feelings and time. Why is that?

So I guess I don’t actually feel young, because there was a sense of savoring time, except of course you wanted it to move so quickly back then. Now, you want it all to slow down (unless you’re at work…then SPEED UP DAMNIT. Kidding…?) Maybe I, we, need to redefine what “adult” even means. It doesn’t have to be all responsibility and seriousness and “taxes.” The beauty of adulthood, at least when we were kids, was we get to do whatever we want whenever we want to do it. HAHAHA If only that were true.

I’m not sure why this is on my brain today. Maybe because it was just my sweet little nephews’ 11th birthday and time is moving so fast that I can still hear their baby giggles in my eardrums. Maybe because I spent the last year scared for all of our lives and there’s what feels like a break in the storm clouds and now I feel like I lost 12 months of living and there’s no getting it back and those are the kinds of realizations you have as a grown person even when you don’t want to. Who’s to say, really.

I guess that’s all for today. Feeling like a non-adult adult. And I guess that’s okay, because adulthood is a sham. It’s like that figure you’ve convinced yourself in the dark you see, but when you turn on the light in a panic, it was just a rolled up ball of socks sitting askew on your robe you lazily draped on your chair (that you often use as a go-between with your closet and hamper). That didn’t actually make any sense, but it was pretty fun to type, so I’m going to leave it there for you to maybe have fun reading it.

See you tomorrow, friends.