Adult-like and shit

I have moments of deep thought.  Granted not often, and it usually is short lived.  Today while sitting in traffic on my way home from work, one of these rare moments hit me.  I’m not sure what provoked it; maybe the song on the radio, maybe the sun, that we haven’t seen here in south Jersey for at least three months, maybe it was just the quiet in my head.  For the first time in a while, I wasn’t thinking about diapers, vomit, house cleaning, or schedules.  I wasn’t worried about time, (rather the lack of), milestones, birthdays, spring cleaning, or money.  It was the first time in many months that I just was.  I was there, driving along, sitting in traffic, with not a thought in my head.  Then I started thinking about my friends, and family.  About how different our lives are now then what we ever dreamed they would be.

Some of us are married, some not.  Some divorced, some just starting their married life journey.  Some of us have babies, some of us have teenagers.  That is beyond scary.  We have real jobs, with real desks and real computers.  (Except me.  I don’t.).  Some of us are deployed in lands that I could never imagine visiting.  With real dangers, and real guns.  Some of us are struggling with our demons, some getting help and some wasting away.  Some of us are in therapy because we are all royally fucked on one level or another.  We have houses, and cars, and plants we haven’t killed yet.  We talk about things like mortgages and Roth IRAs.  We worry about our parents and their aging.  We worry if we will ever have it together.  A good weekend starts on Friday night (not Thursday, day) and ends Sunday evening (not sometime Tuesday). We are perfectly happy to curl up with a glass of wine (not a bottle of Miller Lite) and watch a movie or read a book. 

Is this growing up?  Is this what being adult is?  Because I seem to remember, being eighteen and knowing everything about, well, everything.  I was an adult.  I was grown, damn it.  No one was going to tell me what to do or how to live.  I had that shit.  I was young, smart, and fun.  Looking back, maybe I wasn’t so grown.  Maybe I wasn’t really an adult.  Maybe I needed a lot more life before I could say that. 

I dyed my hair for fun.  Now I dye my hair to cover the ridiculous amount of gray hairs. (I blame this exclusively on the terrible). My boobs are getting dangerously close to my belly button and I think I used to have an ass.  It seems to have flattened out horizontal.  But luckily I still have acne.  Yay for my face!  Please note the sarcasm there.  I wax my lip and chin…What the hell?!?  And I make weird noises after I’ve sat too long. 

This wasn’t a part of the deal.  This wasn’t supposed to be part of the deal.  No one told me about this.  No one told me I would turn into my mother and my mother would turn into my grandmother.  Truthfully, I wouldn’t have believed them anyway. 

So the question I still have is, am I really an adult?  It certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve got this shit.  I still wait for the day that it hits me that I’m a certified adult with my big girl panties on.  In fact, I knew more back then, than I do know.  A whole lot more was black and white, whereas now, all I see is gray.