Almost a Grown-up

I wrote this for a magazine essay contest.  The prompt was "When Did You Finally Feel Like a Grown-up?"  This was my response.

Growing up I always wondered when I would finally come to the point where I felt like a grown-up. It seemed like being just a kid was an excruciating condition, forever yearning for the day when you can shave your legs or wear makeup or even use a debit card for the first time. In my skewed projection of grown-up reality, my elementary school-self just knew it would be thrilling to write out all those bills and proudly stick them in the mailbox each month. I would watch my dad deftly balance the checkbook at the kitchen table every Saturday or see my mom prepare to teach her class at church on Sunday. Filling up the car with gas, shuttling kids from place to place, being in control, running the show. These were grown-up things. Surely, I would someday soon pass that age line of demarcation, ushering me into the adult world and qualifying me as a grown-up.

I’m twenty-five years old and I’m still waiting for that to happen.

Of course, there are times when I’m pretty sure I’ve reached grown-uphood. Just as I watched my mother teach elementary age kids at church each Sunday, now my husband and I are assigned a class of our very own. We’re in charge, but of course realize (very maturely) that the adult thing to do is to teach with love and acceptance rather than authoritarian rule. As a result, the kids feel open to ask about all sorts of things pertaining to my very adult life. Do I shave my legs? Do I kiss my husband? Did my husband have more hair when I married him? All of these things combine to make me feel very-grown up. Almost.

Because there was that time when ten year old Jane said her piano teacher is a better piano teacher than I am, going so far as to question if I’m a professional?! Not sure what constituted a professional piano teacher in a ten year old’s mind, I shot back that yes, as a matter of fact, I am a professional. She even went so far as to say that she, having been on the earth a whole fifteen years less than myself, is a better pianist than me. By this time I was ready to pull a couple of pianos into the cinderblock-walled room and challenge this fourth grader to a duel right then and there! Until I realized that I was fighting with a kid who can’t see over the counter. Not so grown-up of me.

I’m not completely a lost cause though. I am married and, although it’s only been two years since we tied the knot, we have had to face a unique beginning that has helped us grow, both as a couple and as individuals. I met my husband six weeks before he deployed to serve as an Army liaison officer in Pakistan. We were engaged on Christmas day. The next day he left. It was seven long months before I would see him again, just a few short days before our wedding. We had a wonderful two weeks of honeymoon in Yellowstone Park before he left for another eight months to finish his deployment. Spending the first eight months of marriage on different continents teaches a person a lot about communication, patience, and trust. We were stronger after this. I was an Army wife, seasoned by a fifteen month deployment, ready to meet my husband upon his return. Grown-up stuff.

But just before I left Idaho to fly to Fort Bragg, NC where Scott would return, I paid a visit to my dad. Suffering for the last six years from a degenerative brain condition called Pick’s disease, my dad lives in a care center. Although he is almost totally unresponsive now, at the time of my departure a little over a year ago, he could still recognize me and say hello. Sensible conversations were limited.

On this particular visit I found my dad sitting in his wheelchair with a group of other patients by a TV in the main lounge. He had on his Martha’s Vineyard cap, the one I’d brought to him after working there a few summers before. I put my arm around his shoulders and explained to him that I was flying to North Carolina (the place where you grew up, remember?) to meet my husband Scott. For me it was possibly the hundredth identical such explanation, but for him it was fresh. He nodded his approval. I’m flying out tomorrow, I said. We’ll be back in a few months. I love you. Hug, kiss, and I turned to go.

“Be careful.”

I was caught off guard. I hadn’t been expecting these fatherly words and they were made even sweeter by the existence of my dad’s debilitating disease which has slowly destroyed his thinking. Still, he’s my dad. He still wants his little girl to be careful, a knee-jerk reaction of fatherhood even this disease can’t kill. Right then I didn’t feel like a woman in her twenties flying to an Army post to meet her deployed husband. I felt like a kid.

I feel that way a lot around my dad. Oh, there is the adult business of making sure he’s well taken care of. Now, because of the wonderful care he gets at the center, we’re able to allow other aspects of our relationship to take precedence, but when he was at home we were consumed with issues of Medicare, home health, medicines, wheelchairs, etc. Even though I was barely out of high school through this, it swung me into a front row seat for the ride into adulthood. But now, more often than not, though I feel firmly in the drivers seat for the rest of my life, when I’m with my dad someone else is steering and I’m the kid in the back again, wanting advice he can no longer give me. It seems a tragic plight for a daughter to have the form of her father before her, but not be able to reach him. And it is. But again, there are things to learn.

When they told us he had this disease, a discovery it took three years to diagnose, they said that it was common for its victims to become withdrawn and even mean, to regularly lash out. Over six years and a lot of pain, this has never been the case with my dad. From the first day, he has remained the patient, submissive man he has been his whole life, before he was hijacked by this illness. Even though there are days when I wish he could give me a fatherly tip on careers or life in general, his example is really all the advice that I need. It’s what I hope to be when I finally do grow up.

And I’m getting there. There’s the proverbial weight gain that seems to come as a built-in special with marriage that both myself and my husband are experiencing. This struggle with calories and the constant debate on whether or not I really should eat that waffle cone filled with peanut butter and chocolate are concrete reminders that I am no longer a teenager, nor do I have teenager’s body. Other things clamor for attention as well, like which health insurance plan do we go with? Will we really save that much money with the maternity option? And when should we start a family? And when we do, which doctor should we use and on what side of the fence will we fall with the whole immunization issue? Are our investments safe and when will the economy rebound? If these don’t make me feel grown up I don’t know what will!

I do know that there is a happy side to this grown-up thing. I finally have my own car. I don’t have to go to bed at 7:30p.m. I can vote. I have a best friend-husband. My appreciations have deepened and my world has become larger than Saturday mornings with Bayside High. And even though I never imagined a world extending beyond that, it does and it keeps getting better. In this big world I’ve discovered that there is no age line of demarcation and being able to shave your legs is not a qualifier for adulthood. Everyday experience is the thing. At twenty-five years old, I’m more grown up every day. I hope I can say the same thing when I’m sixty-five. And I hope I keep growing forever.

But right now I need to go pay the power bill.

Mmmm, maybe I’ll read a little Harry Potter first.