Do You Know Where You're Going To.....

When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite playthings was a white suitcase. That old, beat up suitcase was my childhood version of having a fairy godmother. Open the top, and Bibbidy, Bobbidy, Boo, I became a grownup. Inside were old dresses, hats and purses of my Granny’s. My sister and I (and my brother at infrequent, reluctant intervals) dressed as Grand Dames in these clothes. There were our Haute Couture, refinement, and most of all, the epitome of adulthood.

As I made my obligatory awkward trip through adolescence and into my later teens, I’m sure I thought more than once, “I can’t wait to grow up.” But, what does that mean, “Grow up” or to be a grown up? At high school graduation, I wondered if that was the moment. The moment when I completed my metamorphosis from being a child to the mythological grown up. I waiting all summer before my first semester of college, but I never did feel that difference inside, an indefinable change or state of being that says to myself and the world, “I no longer think or feel or act as of old. As of this moment, I act with a new mature purpose.”

College came, and stayed and lasted for several really fun years. However, I never really felt essentially older inside. I had reached yet another milestone of life. I did what I thought 20-somethings with new college degrees were supposed to do. I got a job. But, I still didn’t feel grown up.

At an impasse, I asked The Mother once when would I feel grown up. Her reply, “When you have children.”

So, I continued to click off the major life milestones that were supposed to make me a mature grown up. I married and at thirty, had the first of my two children. Somehow, astonishingly, despite all the stress and crisis of Thing 1’s birth, I still didn’t feel a member of the grown up club. Yes, I had diplomas, paid my taxed, went to work, had stretch marks, and C-section scars, but I hadn’t crossed that important line in the sand.

Maybe, I thought, it was because I didn’t have a house and a mortgage. I know the illogical nature of this thought, just as I know the whole idea of “becoming a grown up” is somehow inane. Had I reduced it to a date on the calendar? “This is the day I got married, this is the day I had my first child, and this is the day I became a grown up.” It sounds ridiculous. Wondering what defining action will transform me into adulthood is overly simplistic as well. Perhaps I should make it clear that it’s not necessarily that I was so enamored of being a grown up, per se. It is more a sense of it being a failing of character or completion. Being a ‘grown up’ is what we’re taught, as children, we’re to strive to become: to literally grow up from childhood. Somehow, internally, I seemed to be stuck.

I’ve spent the better part of twenty years feeling like the same basic messed up teenager inside. She’s complex and worldly and yes, difficult, as she’s had the benefit of 20 years of experience. At heart, she’s that hormonal, mixed up, crazy chick that has been going through my life living as best she can and bluffing when she doesn’t know what else to do.

No, the mortgage did not magically grant me entry into grownup-hood.

Yes, there’s now a date on the calendar. January, 6, 2009. That is the day a grown up entered my psyche after twenty years of teenage bluffing.

Tuesday, January 6 is the date where I went from being the child of a parent to being the caregiver and decision maker for a parent. Luckily for me, this is a journey and responsibility I do not have to undertake alone. The prognosis appears very good that my siblings and I will not have these additional tasks for the long term.

But, for today, as I am tired, stressed, worried, angered, bewildered, exhausted, and frustrated, I finally feel like a grown up.

And, now that I know that feeling? If this is what being a grown up is about, I’ll take that messed-up, blustering, bluffing, no-holds-barred teenager any day.

I miss her.