I had been turning the question over in my mind for days. “When did I realize that I was grown up?” For some unknown reason, none of the answers that came readily to mind seemed to fit. Three years before I had married an amazing man, we now had a 2-year-old daughter, and in the past year I had finally been hired to do a job I loved. Surely one of those major experiences should produce the answer for which I was searching? Yet here I was, on the verge of turning 28 and I couldn’t readily say when I knew I was grown up. I did know… right?
The question disturbed me. Maybe it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience that pushed me out of the age of innocence and into the realm of adulthood. I had experienced plenty of pain in my past ten years, including the dissolve of my parents’ marriage and a rather short but painful divorce myself. Instead of living out my life in a big city and becoming an up-and-coming journalist, I instead had crawled back to my hometown and worked a series of unremarkable jobs. The most painful experience, though, was the death of my 12-year-old cousin after her long and painful battle with cancer.
Certainly one of these experiences would trigger an epiphany, but as my mind combed the memories I felt… nothing.
With great frustration I pushed the idea to the back of my mind one Friday evening as my husband Ryan and I prepared our daughter Shannon for DGI’s First Friday. We dressed appropriately for the August heat but even the coolest clothes were no match for the muggy evening. One balloon, a cup of boiled peanuts, and three ketchup-soaked hotdogs later, we were ready to call it a night. We were back in the car well before sunset.
Back at home it was the nightly routine. Shannon was bathed and pj’d, stories were read and songs were sung. Once she was tucked away, Ryan and I decided on a Netflix envelope that had been sitting on the DVD player for far too long. After a shockingly good comedy we were surprised to realize that we were both still wide awake. Neither of us stayed up particularly late anymore since Shannon rose at the crack of dawn.
“Are you hungry?” Ryan asked as he slid the DVD back into its return red envelope. Images of the half-eaten monstrosity of a hotdog came to mind, but that had been hours ago. I nodded, a little too eagerly.
“How about you call in some Huddle House,” he suggested, “and I’ll go pick it up.”
Excited now, I rose from the couch to search through the junk drawer in our kitchen. Back before we were married, before our daughter and all the responsibility, my husband and I would go out with friends and each night inevitably end up at Huddle House. A weekend just didn’t seem complete without an A.M. egg breakfast or patty melt plate. These days the early morning breakfasts were few and far between – nonexistent, really – so this felt like a major treat!
I emerged with the tattered menu, we each decided what to order and I placed the call. Less than 20 glorious minutes later my husband returned with a large plastic bag filled with deliciously greasy food.
In between savored bites, my husband licked his fingers and noted, “I couldn’t believe it was so dead in there.”
“Really?” I asked, opening another ketchup packet. “Do people not go to Huddle House after they go out anymore?”
“I guess not,” Ryan said, “because there was only one table of people in there, and they looked older than us.”
“What a shame,” was all I could think as I covered my hashbrowns and drove the fork in for a bite. It was then that I glanced at the large clock hanging above our television and after a moment of confusion, laughter bubbled out of me.
“It’s not even 11 o’clock!” I cried in amusement. “We’re sitting here excited about our late-night Huddle House, but that’s exactly what it is! ‘Late-night’ – not ‘early-morning’ like it used to be!”
“I can’t believe it’s so early,” Ryan said, “when I feel like it’s after midnight.” Bemused, we settled back in to eat but as I raised my fork for another bite, realization dawned.
I was sitting at home on a Friday night… with my husband… with a daughter asleep in the next room. We would be in bed well before midnight and probably cut the grass the next morning and take Shannon to the park.
I wasn’t a big-shot reporter like I had dreamed, but instead was a mom who worked for a not-for-profit agency and worried about keeping my house in a somewhat-tidy condition. I was once again living in the town where I was raised… where my mother was raised… where her mother was raised…
Where was the big city, the big job, the big money, the prestige? Where was the big city life I had so craved?
All of these thoughts flashed through my head but the most shocking of all was this one burning question: Why didn’t I care?
In trying to determine the precise moment in which realized I was grown up, I had been searching through the major events in my life from the past ten years. Yet ten years ago I would have never imagined my life this way. Ironic? Of course, because back then I was so certain of my adulthood.
I suppose we all have the moments, those specific moments that make us pause and reflect on our lives. We change majors or drop out of school, some of us get married and have children. We buy homes and cars and fancy appliances and gadgets… We might lose our jobs, or worse, someone close to us. Sometimes we might lose ourselves for a while only to reemerge a stronger person.
That is when I realized that my life had turned out nothing like I had planned.
And yet I was happy. All grown up and happy. Share Tweet
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