Christy P asked me in a comment to my post about this our first Christmas in our own home: "Do you feel like a grownup yet? I am starting to."
Funny. Here I am, 35 years old and the mother of four, and you would think I would feel like a grownup by now. Truth is, I am also just starting to. I have felt like an impostor of a grown-up most of my technically-adult life, assuming that all my peers are really grownups and I am not.
Interesting that Christy's comment came up in the context of celebrating holidays at home, leading one's own family, and not some other context. I assumed for years that the biggest reason I didn't feel like a grownup was because I didn't have a so-called "real job." First I was in school, and then I was in school some more, and then I was in school SOME MORE, and then I became a mother (while I was still in school), and then I was a mother at home with small children, um, running their schooling. I am, it seems, still in school. The fact that I rather enjoy the situation has seemed almost to confirm my non-grownup status.
For a long time I thought that another source of my feeling as if I were impersonating a grownup was a sense of a stunted appearance. I think this is a vestige from childhood, as I was a very short child, slow to mature and socially backward, who perpetually looked (and sometimes behaved) at least two years younger than my peers, never quite able to catch up. Until quite recently the face in the mirror always looked "too young" — I don't mean that in a good way, like "youthfully attractive," but rather "childish." Losing a third of my body weight last year did away with that — as everything deflated and dropped and relaxed over that year, I saw something new in the mirror, lines that had been slowly forming over the past years, but masked and camouflaged by that infantilizing plumpness that has dominated. I like looking my age, and feel I've put on a much more convincing disguise.
Family life hasn't done it either, and I shouldn't have been surprised by that either. Look around: there's plenty of evidence that adulthood is neither a prerequisite for, nor a result of, making babies. Nor does getting married automatically signify a transition in responsibility. Once it might have, but it's well obscured now. I concede that I haven't had to endure much hardship, and that perhaps it's an easy, happy adulthood that has given me the impression of no adulthood at all. Or perhaps it's that I was free and clear for such a relatively short period, so that I've had a sense of being cared for for most of my life; sometimes, when Mark's doing the taxes or putting snow tires on the van, or sometimes when I'm awake in bed doing crossword puzzles and glance over to see him fallen asleep with the light on, curled around a sleeping child who asked for Daddy at bedtime, I am startled to realize that I am married to a 36-year-old man. I'm pretty sure I am technically of marriageable age, so this ought not to shock me, but nevertheless it still does.
Perhaps the feeling of masquerade is a quirk of my probably disordered personality. Perhaps it is just one long dress rehearsal for age-related dementia ("No, Mrs. A., I'm not your mass transport TA, I'm just here to change your bedpan.") Or maybe it's more common than I think, this disguise, and I am no more or less special, no younger or older inside than anyone else.
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