AARP, but I thought it was sent to my parents…
…aw crap…it must be mis-labelled!
I was married at 25 years old, had a nice house at 28, and beautiful daughter #1 at 29 and #2 at 32.
However, I didn’t really feel like an adult until I went to my oldest daughter’s kindergarten orientation. She was in a nice preschool before that but the kindergarten orientation was completely different. We walked into a full auditorium of people about our age concerned about their kids. Being in a big room with a homogeneous people your age almost never happens outside of college. We knew some of them and many we didn’t but it is strange when you see people that could have graduated college with you raising their hands and asking questions about the curriculum minutia of kindergarten.
Hey! I’ve always preferred NPR!
The first gray pubic hair.
I’m an adult?
No, seriously. I’m always expecting someone to show up and take away all my so-called adult privileges. At this point, I think it’ll take marriage or parenthood to do it (mortgage didn’t do it, matching couch and loveseat didn’t do it, surgery didn’t do it…).
I think it was when I got married. I was 39. I had emigrated from Canada to spend my life with this woman. This was a mission I couldn’t screw up. However much I coasted before, there was to be no more coasting. I had another person now, to depend on me to do the right thing. I had to prove myself worthy of her having gone through half of this ordeal and signing away her life on the unknown. I really wanted it, like I’d never wanted anything before, and would do whatever it took to get it and keep it. That’s the mark of an adult.
Some people are born old – errr . . . mature.
The day I went out and got my first job.
To echo those who posted upthread,
When I found myself hand feeding my mother before cancer finally took her.
When I started listening to the CBC.
When I’d talk to new, young hires and learn that they’d never seen Star Wars, didn’t recognize the plastic insert that goes in the centre of a “45”, had never seen black and white TV, didn’t remember the Cold War, etc…
Not “adult” so much as “oh, I’m the grownup” moment was late one night in my very first apartment when the toilet overflowed.
I’d unplugged a toilet before - that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that until that moment, I had never really thought about where plungers come from - they’d always just kind of been there before, just under the sink or in a cabinet or something. As it turns out, the grownup in the house has to buy one. And I hadn’t done that. And it was really late at night, and most nearby stores were closed.
It was an unpleasant experience.
When I decided that the lava lamp and black light posters was not a good look for an 20 year old male.
Yes, I am old.
Also, my 6 month old daughter sleeping on my chest while I was watching football.
I’m still not quite there, but the first warning sign was when I got a sweater for Christmas, and was genuinely glad to have it.
Friends getting married for the first time (an assload of them, this year) has started to drive it home.
FTR, I listened to talk radio all day long when I was 12. I actually started to become interested in (then-)current music when I grew out of that. I was a weird kid.
Good. Lord. I am in the middle of my first semester of college and sometimes it boggles my mind when I think about the number of things that had always just been there. Food in the fridge, for example. It used to be I’d open the door and there’d be something. A piece of stale cheese at the least. I open my little fridge now and realize I have to stock it myself. I used to lurve chocolate milk. Now I lurve (free!) water.
I’ve worked pretty had in my private life to avoid becoming an adult. I’ve never married and never had kids, so I would say I was pretty succesful. I own a home now, but only because my dad died and left me enough money to buy it. I suppose that was the most adult decision I made – to buy a home as a means of protecting myself from pissing the money away in small steps. Then again, if I REALLY was an adult, I could have just banked it and chosen not to piss it away.
Professionally, I’ve reached the point where I’m the acknowledged expert on a number of matters, and if I don’t know it or can’t do it, we have to hire a consultant. And I decide when we do that. When I realized I was the person everyone had to depend on for certain things, and I myself had no one to turn to, that’s when I knew I was a “professional” adult.
I became a “professional” adult about 7 years ago. I’m 49 now.
I’m going to visit my dad tomorrow. In hospital. In the Aged Care Unit.
He’s in the early stages of dementia. He’s terribly confused. He used to be a bull of a man; immensely physically strong, and of a very keen intellect and wit. Now he’s hunched over, shaking, not finishing sentences, forgetting where he is, and wearing adult nappies/diapers.
So yeah, I suppose this adulthood jive is down to me now. Shit, I’m going grey enough for the gig.
My dad died about 5 years ago, and almost my first thought was, "I’m an orphan. :eek: " Not a real adult thought. My mom had died several years earlier.
Until that moment, I never would have thought to apply the term to someone in their 40s.
My first thought was when my son was born but that is not really the truth. Maybe when my daughter was born and I had two children, that should make you an adult, right?
That was not really the case either.
It hit me on Thanksgiving when my two kids, now nineteen and seventeen, were playing video games together. They get along so well now. They have gone shopping and to the library together. They arranged to take their dad out last month for his birthday all on their own.
I guess the fact that I have raised my two kids to “adulthood” makes me feel like an adult.
Sounds kinda strange typed out.
Don’t say that. 
Mine goes in for surgery on Monday.
As for the OP, I guess it was just kind of a realization that “this is all there is.” When you’re in school you get to anticipate what’s next. High school, then college. New classes, new subjects.
I was driving to work one day and just thought, “this is it.” This isn’t going to change. This is my life now, doing the same thing over and over. It was more than a bit depressing.
I considered myself an adult when I was 13. Now that I’m 45, I don’t want the job anymore. Who’s taking applications for the position of a 13 year-old?