I’ve been an adult for a while now. Like over 20 years. We’ve owned 3 houses. We’ve done major home repairs. We’ve gone to friend’s funerals.
Today, my dining room furniture matches and finally I feel like an adult. We bought the table 12 years ago, but couldn’t afford the $2000 for 8 chairs. Because our house is going on the market this week, we decided to finally buy chairs that matched the table when we found them for about $1100 for 8. (We’ve been using black and chrome folding chairs with an oak table, how gauche.)
Heh. I finally got a real set of dining room furniture but my eat-in kitchen isn’t really big enough for it so it’s not arranged in all its glory. So I think I am still not an adult. I don’t know that I’ll ever own real estate, and I don’t see marriage or children in the future, so it may be endless adolescence for me!
I got pregnant at the age of 23. Father of said baby pretty much bailed. Parents found out (was still living at home at the time) and my father kicked me out of the house after telling me that he would pray for a miscarriage. Disowned. I realized then that I had to grow up and take care of the child on my own.
4 weeks later, I lost the baby. (Ectopic Pregnancy) My father “Welcome” me back into the family as long as we acted like the pregnancy never happened.
What happened in the following 6 years is long and involved, but it was at that point I realized no matter what, I couldn’t depend on anyone else but me.
I remember a time I was deceived into thinking I was an adult. Early in my freshman year of college, we had a big assembly in the big auditorium. Some people in the audience were throwing frisbees back and forth, indoors. Even in the balcony! In high school, no such tomfoolery would have been allowed. I felt so adult!
Now that I’m 34, I look back and laugh. Still not really sure I’m an adult, now. I did just buy nice living room sofas… but my living room also contains legos and Magic: The Gathering cards.
Nothing has driven it home yet. Friends having kids, getting married, nah. Actually being in charge of large groups of children, and even having to teach them something, just a job. One friend has died. Can one get away with not having a particular revelatory moment? Am I missing something? (Only partly hypothetical.)
When i first started working full time i thought I was an adult BUT i just spend my money on stuff that an adult really should (alcohol, dvds/cds, more alcohol .ect).
But being 22 i find it hard to see myself as an adult.
When I was 25 or so, I complained to a coworker that I didn’t like the new REM (pretty much anything from Automatic for the People forward) as much as the older stuff. He announced that, once you only like a group’s older music, that you were officially “old.”
And then when I was 29 my mother died suddenly from complications from surgery. You’re never the same after that…
I’m 24. About a month ago I had my parents over for dinner for the first time since I moved out for good in June. Which doesn’t sound like much, but it felt really bizarre. I guess the thought process went something like, "Hm, that’s odd, people don’t have their parents over for dinner…unless…I mean, my parents had my grandparents over all the t- :eek: "
Also I just found my first gray hair, which kind of forces the point.
When I was young and spry (early 20s), I used to have a theory that older people watched the news all the time because they needed to know what they should be afraid of (i.e., epidemics, scams, foot fetishists on shoe-stealing sprees). Interestingly enough, the more “geezerly” I get with the news (from any source; TV, radio, internet), the more I seem to encounter people who are 20-plus years older than I am, who studiously avoid the news because they find it too depressing.
So maybe I won’t really be an adult until I start listening to The Clash on the way to work again.
While before I could stay up till all hours, get no sleep, go to work and come home and crash, I suddenly realized one day that I can’t do that anymore. I have three little people who have bedtimes, and have to be to school, and need to eat and bathe. All this takes scheduling, and staying up just can’t be done.
I was 26 at the time.
(It didn’t take until the third kid to start doing all that stuff, it just took me that long to realize that I didn’t stay up as long as I used to.)
And FTR, I’ve listened to talk radio since I was 19 or so. Drives my husband insane.