Can I just say? That I really do not enjoy being an adult.
Oh sure, it has its perks, I suppose. For instance, I can drive. I can enjoy an adult beverage out in the open, without having to slide the vodka bottle back under the passenger seat in D's beat up old Subaru while she looked out for the cops. (Probably those two examples shouldn't have been mentioned consecutively, but you get my point...) I can stay up as late as I want. If I feel like eating cheese and crackers for dinner, so be it. What else? I can go to R-rated movies. I can vote. I can get jury duty. I can hold a mortgage. Wait...
As I was saying, adulthood is too frequently not fun. Not fun at all. Like working? Really grating on me. Cooking dinner? Occasionally enjoyable, when done with others or at least not in a mad frenzy. On a daily basis it is highly sucky. Especially the whole cleaning up afterward thing. Hate that part. The thing about being a grownup is you are compelled to clean it up. Can't resist. Must Remove Mess From Kitchen So Kitchen Is Not Eyesore/Health Threat. And while I am reluctantly inflicted with this compulsion, it is glaringly clear that Fifth Grader and Third Grader are not the slightest bit bothered by a mess of any kind, which I really envy.
Also, there is the matter of getting older. Not a fan of the getting older. Don't like feeling that opportunities have been missed. Not enjoying the amount of time I feel like sleeping. Less than crazy about the redundancy of adulthood. Nothing like watching an hour of hip hop music videos - chockful of ripely endowed 20-year-old women frolicking in VIP rooms with extremely buff young men - while I get my nails done to remind me that a whole host of behaviors are now officially wildly inappropriate to my own life.
But at least!...at least, I think...I am not trying to make up for my own sorrows in life by micromanaging the lives of my children. Oh, how I hope I am not doing that. Because believe me, I see it going on around me. Gymnastics comes to mind. The invitational of this past weekend springs to memory. The incessant, nails-on-chalkboard, no end in sight gabfest between certain other mothers of certain other girls on certain other teams about the minutiae of their daughters' routines and the hours of labor (their daughters' labor, not theirs) invested to perfect specific elements of said routines rings a faint bell. Oh, the despair! The frustration! The blatant pushing! It was eye-opening. And I wanted to tell these painfully disappointed women that they ought to put down their nachos and haul their own tired butts out there on the balance beam and we'll see how exasperating that is to watch...but I did not.
Because I am a grownup.
I have meandered, I know. I have no tidy ending today. Just a simple "I feel much better now."
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3 comments:
When I was little I couldn't wait to grow up so I could eat all the raw cookie dough I wanted (yeah, I had big dreams). Unfortunately, my adult self does not have the metabolism of my child self.
Being a grownup is the worst! Remember all those years when we couldn't wait for it? God, we were dumb.
I'm so with you on this one. I would give anything to be an undergraduate again- that blissful space between living under your parent's control and assuming real world responsibilities. sigh!
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