Why I'm not a grown-up

[dreaminghope]

Adults work full-time and get their own place; they buy appliances, furniture and art; they have dishes that match; they acquire car and mortgage payments; they have credit cards and cheques; they contribute to RRSP funds and save their money for practical things.

I have done or am doing all these things. I'm excited about getting myself a DustBuster with my Air Miles points. I even like doing dishes and laundry (most of the time). I joke about relationships and the difficulty of living with a man with my mom.

But I'm not a grown-up. I don't drink wine with dinner. I don't get a morning paper, nor do I get up early enough in the morning to read it before work if I did. I don't dress up for work. I can't remember the last time I bought myself brand-new clothes. By my parents' examples, those are the things that real grown-ups do.

I don't want to be my parents (though they are good and wonderful people; we simply don't share all our values), but they have set the standard for my adulthood in the small details of their lives and routines. I'm not sure how to feel like an adult without following their example. I'm sure everyone's standard for feeling like they've finally achieved adulthood is different because the truth for each person is in their upbringing.

It isn't bad, not feeling like a grown-up, but I have all the responsibilities, so it would be nice to have that satisfaction, instead of just feeling like a big kid playing house.

What are your standards for adulthood? Do you feel like a grown-up? If you do, when did it happen?

Comments

[rythos42.livejournal.com]

A good question. I agree with you in the "not a grown-up" issue. But I wonder if the standards we set today are constantly moving. Do we constantly look at our parents for an example of what it means to be grown up? If that is the case, we won't be grown up until we are dead, as that is the last state our parents enter that they never change from. How morbid of me. Gaah.

[dreamhope.livejournal.com]

Do we constantly look at our parents for an example of what it means to be grown up?

I don't know that this applies, in my case anyway, because the things I'm talking about are things that are so consistant. My parents have always done these things and will continue to do them into the foreseeable future; that's what makes them so powerful as symbols. So even if my parents stop drinking wine with dinner, they did it for so long that it will still be the "adult thing to do" in my mind. Also, I doubt I'll ever think that I have to retire in order to feel like an adult, though that is the next logical stage in my parents' lives.

However, on the morbid side of things, I heard somewhere that one doesn't feel like a grown-up until one's parents have both passed away, as until then, you are always a child to them. Weird for me to think that, if that's true, both my parents don't feel like grown-ups either.