I've had three adulthood milestones that made me realize, "Wow, I must be an adult now."
There's the time I turned 18 and was old enough to sign forms without a parent or guardian's signature. The first form I ever signed by myself was a credit card that those predatory companies give to 18-year-olds who are about to learn financial literacy the hard way.
I thought, "Wait, I can just sign this without telling my parents?"
I celebrated by buying two Subway footlongs for a friend and me. But he had already eaten dinner, so I ate the second one myself.
Like an adult with no self-control.
I didn't pay that credit card off until about six years later, with my then-fiancée's guidance, who did learn financial literacy lessons from her parents, but couldn't eat two subs to save her life. I still married her, though.
Then there was the time in my early forties that I realized I could just buy songs off Apple Music without waiting to receive a gift card for Christmas or my birthday.
I thought, "Wait, I can just buy a song? With my own money?"
I walked around with my head held higher than I had in years. To celebrate this new feeling of adulthood, I drove my own car to a liquor store and bought some wine for my wife and me.
The third time happened around this time of year, nearly 27 years ago.
My wife and I had been parents for roughly two years, and married for five, and we would travel to my in-laws', my mom's, or my dad's house for every holiday. We split Thanksgiving and Christmas, but invariably someone got left out, which made things extra stressful.
And I thought, "Wait, we can just have the holidays at our house? We don't have to travel?"
So we declared to our parents that we were now the anchor Thanksgiving and Christmas, and if anyone wanted to travel to our house for the holiday, they were more than welcome, but we were staying put.
"We have a family now, so it's time we became the anchor and have our parents travel," I told my wife. "That's what you do as an adult. As long as that's OK with you, that is."
She was OK with that, and we became the anchor gathering site for the next 27 years.
"Great!" said my wife. "Happy to get that mess off my plate."
"But. . . but. . ." I said.
Then she said, "Oh, and we're doing Christmas morning at our house this year."
"NOOOOOOO!"
What just happened? When did my children become adults? When did they start leading their own lives and controlling their own destinies? Adulting is dumb, and I hate it.
I've had other times where I realized I was an adult, but it was more of an "Oh, $#!%" feeling.
My oldest daughter was about two — the same daughter who stabbed me in the heart with a Christmas cookie.
"Do you realize they just let us take this child?" I said to my wife. We were in the kitchen, feeding her pancakes, and I had this sudden, horrified realization that we were in charge. We were just feeding this kid pancakes because we wanted to, and there was no one to tell us that she needed a balanced breakfast or should eat fruit.
"What?" she said.
"I mean, no one gave us permission or anything to have a kid. They just handed her to us and said we're in charge of her now."
"Not really," she said. "They did a whole home study to make sure we were suitable."
We adopted all three of our children, and there is a rigorous process you have to go through to take them home, but nothing about after you get them there. There was no manual, no oversight, and no one but us.
My wife looked at me like I was crazy. "What are you talking about?"
"Do you realize," I said, "that we're just in charge of things now? We're responsible for this tiny person, and no one is ever going to check up on us to make sure we're not just feeding her pancakes every meal? (We weren't.) We're operating without any kind of safety net here!"
"Well, yeah. What did you think we were doing?"
"I don't know, I just figured someone would stop us if we ever had a dumb idea."
She glanced at her wedding ring. "No, there’s no one to stop you from dumb ideas anymore."
That's when I understood what being an adult is about: taking all those moments you've accumulated over the years and exercising sound judgment about what's right and wrong, good and bad, celebrating victories, and lamenting your regrets.
Not that second footlong, though. I'm not sorry about that at all.
Photo credit: Wiros (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 2.0)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.