Now I see what you meant. Thanks for explaining again, instead of just throwing up your hands and putting the burden of miscommunication on my shoulders.
I fully retract my accusations of contradiction.
However, I still vehemently disagree with the idea that all adults are parents.
The whole “contradiction” thing was only part of my problem with your post, and a minor part at that. And I think you know it, and have deliberately ignored the rest of our little disagreement. As I stated earlier in this thread: “My reply of ‘bullshit’ had … everything to do with your implication that, say, a 19-year-old parent is truly an adult while, say, a 69-year-old war veteran who never had children is not.”
This entire past 12 months has been made up of adult moments for me:
My dad died last Christmas
I bought my first brand new car
My husband and I bought a house
I got pregnant
We bought vinyl replacement windows for the whole house (that was a biggie for me)
This will likely by my grandmother’s last Christmas with us (Hospice has been called in) and the realization of that, coupled with losing my dad, makes me panic with the fear of getting older.
The events of my adult life before this were few and far between, spread out over the last 16 years, then all of the above happened in the last year and threw me for a loop.
I’m 35 and if you were to ask me a year ago, how old I FELT, I would’ve said “About 22”. Ask me now and I’ll say, “Exactly 35”.
When the Playboy playmates started becoming younger that I was.
Even after serving 4 years in the Navy the realiziation hit when I was in my mid 20’s and both of my parents died a few years apart and I bought the house I grew up in. When I started moving stuff around and tearing up stuff it was an interesting moment.
(Just to add to the approaching trains, I don’t have kids and feel very adult.)
For me it was looking at the Blackhawks roster and seeing people younger than me. Something about realizing you’re not actually going to be a sports superstar that plants you firmly in adulthood.
When I was 18, I dated a 25 year old woman. And boy, was she cool! I mean, she had her own place, she’d lived on her own, she’d done things, she’d gone through different phases in her life and changed as a result, all sorts of neat stuff. Time passed, and one morning I woke up to realize that I was 25, and had done all of the cool things she had that made her seem like an adult. A few years ago, at the age of about 35, I found myself hanging out with a 25 year old woman with whom I worked. She had just done something spectacularly flaky, and I thought to myself “ah, what do I expect, she’s 25, she’s just a kid.”
That sums it up nicely. I look in the mirror and see the wrinkles around my eyes and forehead, the grey hair (and the places where there ISN’T hair…my scalp is an unusual amalgam of my Father and Mom’s Father) and think <sigh>.
I’ve been excercising consistently for the last 6 years or so, and that did wonders for how I FEEL. It was a telling comparison when moving family when my Brother in law, who’s 35, a smoker, and not very active, did a good quarter of the moving I did…and I really didn’t hurt afterwards.
…But you still can’t hide the aging going on around the edges. I looked at my hands the other day and thought ‘Heh, when did I get my Father’s hands?’
